Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 06:48:08AM -0500, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Not quite answering the question you asked, but optical drives from 15-25
years ago are 5.25" IDE devices.

Miniscribe also shipped MFM disks with an ATA adaptor board -- okay, IDE is
exactly that, but these were visibly discrete components -- although I can't
find an example of such a contraption which shipped with a 5.25" MFM disk.
It's likely that the adaptor board would "work" when transplanted onto a
5.25" disk, although getting it to properly handle the different geometry
may be challenging.

Given my failure to find a proper counterexample (not that I seriously
expected to find one), I agree that the Quantum Bigfoot was almost certainly
one of a kind. It was a niche product which only had a few years of
viability, and given that apart from capacity, Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) were
terrible drives, we'd have paid close attention to any competing drives and
would still remember them.