Re: Do I win a Darwin Award nomination......?
- From: Ben Myers <ben_myers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:53:23 -0500
William R. Walsh wrote:
Hi!Count yourself among the very lucky with your mostly positive experiences with the Quantum Bigfoot drives. The whole deal about the oxide coating process became public when many of the Big Feet stopped walking, or spinning. AFAIK, they spun at a leisurely 4200rpm, which is one thing that made them slow. The other factor was the areal density of the tracks, with not all that many sectors per track. Definitely the sow's ear of disk drives... Ben Myers
Some dim-bulbs decided to build 1/2 height 5 1/4" hard drives, figuringthat theadded surface area would compensate for the bad spots and yield areasonablecapacity.
It was my understanding that these drives were built to provide budget
computers with enough disk storage to compete with better systems. (I've
never seen one outside of very cheap computers...such as the Compaq Presario
and eMachines of the time.)
Well, the oxide coating was so imperfectly bonded to the platters that
it would flake off, taking data along with it. Nice approach, instead
of scrapping the new coating process and simply retooling. The failure
of the Bigfoot tarnished Quantum's reputation and led to its being
acquired by another set of dim-bulbs, namely Maxtor...
Interesting. I've had a lot of the Bigfoot drives through here, and my
experiences were actually pretty good. They weren't particularly fast, but
they were reliable. I still have some running along perfectly; only one ever
failed of "natural" causes. The rest were retired when I took the systems
using them out of service and sold or gave them away.
That's a lot more than I can say for the 3.5" Fireball and similar drives.
"Fireball" was a good description. These drives didn't fail so much--they
just acted very, very strangely. I built walls out of the dead ones pulled
from HP Vectra VL, VA and VE computers coming out of a large insurance
company. They were being donated to area schools, and I helped recondition a
lot of them. A lot of otherwise good computers landed in the trash (or, more
accurately, they were quietly placed in the back of my pickup truck) only
for the want of a good hard drive. It just wasn't in the budget for the
donated hardware--those didn't work for any reason beyond the most minor
stuff were gutted or dumped. This is, I think, the reason why Quantum left
the disk business.
Quantum's hard drive line was bought by Maxtor and I've even seen some
rebadged Fireballs with the Maxtor logo. Quantum itself still remains as a
tape storage vendor. Rather amazingly, Seagate has maintained the Quantum
drive information.
William
.
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- Do I win a Darwin Award nomination......?
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