Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s

[Jules Richardson]

On 7/21/21 4:20 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
>> and a whole bunch(!) of 10- and 20-GByte IDE/PATA 5.25-inch desktop hard drives
> 
> I consider this bit unlikely TBH. 5.25" *IDE* HDDs were _extremely_
> rare. The 5.25" format was dead before IDE came along, and 99% were
> 3.5", except the Quantum Bigfoot range. Those were slow, unreliable,
> but cheap. I have one, as a sentimental reminder of full-width hard
> disk drives from the beginning of my career.

Compaq were big fans of the Bigfoot drives, if I remember right - I expect 
that's what they are. I'd put them in that "rare but not valuable" category 
though, possibly of minor interest to a few collectors or museums just for 
the quirky aspect.

Regarding your "IDE HDDs were extremely rare" comment, did *anyone* other 
than Quantum release an IDE drive in that 5.25" form factor? I can't think 
of any, everything else was 3.5", although some early vendor's drives were 
the same height as a "half height" 5.25" drive.