Listen to that canning sound. I remember these well back in 2000. My first want to be drive was going to be a quantum fireball 20Gb in 2000/2001 but the PC store was taking months to get one in and ended giving me a seagate 40GB for the same price. I was the envy of the school class as I had a 40Gb for $240 where most of the other kids best drivers were 15 to 30GB and paid over $300 for the 30GB models. I did a similar "struck gold" with my 256MB of SD ram I bought for about 60-70 bucks when ram prices happen to tank and they sky rocketed to well over 200-250 bucks for the next 3 -4 years after that lol. I previously had 64MB 6 months earlier for $90, was such a win.
"Look this man, it's a Quantum Bigfoot TX 8GB, with IDE connection and molex power support, it even has an LED and nostalgic drive spinning sound, it literally blow your face off with his 5.25" profile"
I worked in a PC store for a year (1997-1998) building and servicing machines. We did build some with Bigfoot drives in them as they were cheaper and boy did we regret it. We had used, Seagate, Western Digital and Quantum 3.5 inch drives and didn't find much difference in terms of reliability. We did have a much higher return rate on the Bigfoots.
A stroll down memory lane. I was in the business, back then, and distinctly remember having mounted in a PC a Bigfoot 5 inches FULL size. A proper BEAST. Normal ones had a capacity from 3.2 to 4Gb, the full size was about double.
Oh man, I had this exact same drive, it used to get swapped between several of my computers and so I never had any screws holding it in place...one day it slid out of a computer case and crashed onto the tiled floor. whilst I was walking through the kitchen, ..and that was the end of it. I really loved that noisy old quantum :)
I agree, it would be really interesting to have as an option. Though cases are starting to come without optical drive bays, so it might be an idea that wouldn't be so feasible in the future.
It's not nescessarily possible (bigger drives need thicker platters to reduce wobble/vibrations and tolerances are much higher today); but if you could make them as thin and with as many platters as a 10 TB helium filled drive (pretty affordable today) you'd get about 19 TB. (The 5.25 inch drives of old had 5.12 inch platters, and 3.5 inch drives have 3.74 inch platters (!). The spindle hole is ~1 inch.)
@@pyeltd.5457 No he actually means 10 TB. Do you even know what a helium filled drive is? Or how SMR recording works for hard drives? I suggest you look it up.
@@soylentgreenb I think with 4 platters crammed into the Bigfoot form factor it would be around 35-46 TBytes with today’s data densities. In all honesty, this would be seemingly practical for archive storage I would think.
I had this exact same HDD in my old Pentium 200 MMX PC i bought back in 1997 when the 200 MMX had first released. At the time this HDD was the biggest capacity available, my brother-in-law used to call that PC of mine a Supercomputer lol. Funny how times change. Oh and at the time if i remember correctly we paid around $4200 for the PC, compared to my old 286SX PC we bought back in 1991 it was slightly cheaper (286SX cost us $5500 lol). Its funny looking back at classic Computer hardware and seeing how far we've come.
Wow, that spin up sound brings back memories. Back some time in late 97 IIRC I bought a Compaq Presario 2256 with a 300mhz AMD K6, 48mb 66mhz ram, a 2mb S3 ViRGE onboard graphics chip, 4gb Quantum Bigfoot hard drive and Windows 95.
I have one from my families 1997 Hp pavilion, tested it in crystal disk info and it has bad sectors, My socked foot is on it right now, feels really cold on the sole of my foot, very soothing.
I had a friend, back in the day, who had a 12 gb version. I remember it being the biggest (physically & capacity wise) hard drive I'd ever seen. Brings back memories.
My first PC, circa 1996, had a 2.5 GB Quantum Bigfoot drive installed. It did not have as fast of a spin-up time as the drive in the video. I remember it sounding impressive at the time. It was quite reliable though, surviving for many years as a secondary drive. The capacity finally ended its life, being too small for most things by the time I shelved it.
Woo had a couple of these back in the day and recently got my hands on one. Have not used it yet. Thanks to you Phil I just built my first retro gaming PC, a Pentium 2 300Mhz on a dual P2 mobo with a terminator in the other slot, 256MB Ram, 8GB Maxtor HDD that is quiet and works perfectly (amazingly), paired with a GeForce 4 MX440. Not a super fast card but seems plenty fast for the P2. I also just put a dual (dual core) Opteron system together with a nVidia 9800GT video card 4G of RAM, and have parts on the way to build a Slot 1, dual Pentium 3. I would not have bothered with dual P3's for Windows 98, but the mobo a friend game me was dual slot 1 and I didn't have a terminator. Cheers man, you and your web site have been fun, helpful and inspiring to relive the old days. :D
Super cool. Reminds me of the Seagate 5mb MFM drive my father's Leading Edge used to use. I didn't know there were companies that continued to try to use the 5.25" bay.
Loved Quantum 3.5" drives - found them to be very high quality with low failure rate - I did have a bigfoot in the day, it was considerably slower than their 3.5 inchers
Cudos for putting in that audio recording! I would have swore the one we had at the place I was working back then had a 2GB capacity, though it was a long time ago.
I had the 4Gb, and then the mahosive 12Gb, I still have the 12 in the loft, it served me well and I can't bring myself to throw it away. I like how it reminds me how storage has grown over the years. I still have the habit of buying huge amounts of storage rather than deleting things, 12Gb was so much space back then, I'm up to 25Tb now, that's crazy and yet it's normal now.
I was building a retro rig for Windows 98 about ten years ago. Initially, I had an off-brand PCI sound card, but it gave me so many issues with its drivers, I swapped it out for a Sound Blaster AWE32. To make the AWE32 fit in my case, I had to permanently remove all of the 3.5" bays (by means of drilling out the case rivets). Now I was left with a system that only had its 5.25" bays, leaving me no place to mount my hard drive. The only solution (not really, but I was young and ignorant) was to find a 5.25" hard drive. Thus, I became acquainted with the 8gb Quantum Bigfoot. A perfect solution. The system worked perfectly. I still have it to this day. Not mentioned in the video: It actually has a hard drive access light built into the circuit board on the top of the drive. My old case had a plexiglass window on the top, so it was nice to see the drive light doing its thing.
My first PC, a Peacock with a Pentium 120 and 16MB Ram had an 1.2 GB Quantum Bigfoot. It died within a week and I got another one under warranty. The replacement drive worked for years. No Idea where it is now. I don't recall it dying on me, maybe I gifted it to someone. Man, that boot up sound is nostalgic. Mine was a first generation drive, so it spun a lot slower. For the pun: "A Quantum of Diskspace"
I didnt know such drives existed, but I had idea, that platters would be larger, and then, sequential speed at the edge of the platter would be higher. That would lead to bigger sequential read/write speed. But I would let them to go 10000 RPM, that would lead to incredible sequential speeds. Anyway, more expensive solution was RAID. I think, that's the reason, why 3,5'' disks went more popular, anyone who wanted more, just used them in RAID, or with SCSI card.
Had one of these in a pentium 2 computer, it was so loud, but it worked up to the day I had to sell the computer, and as far as I know it still works in someone else’s home. I had the computer up until 2021
I owned a 4 GB Bigfoot drive back in the 90s which i used with my Amiga A1200, but i don't remember it being that loud. Anyway, due to limitations in the Amiga's O/S, i had to split it into two partitions of slightly less than 2 GB each. but it worked quite well that way.
IIRC Quantum is still in business but they only manufacture tapes for tape storage used in mainframes which are still used by the military and banks I do have a Quantum drive in my P100 but is a Fireball instead of a Bigfoot (I had a 2 GB Bigfoot and it was so slow loading Windows 98)
I had one of these in my "tricked out" Packard Bell 486SX33 with 36MB RAM (4MB onboard, and a 32MB SIMM). It was a fantastic upgrade to the 200MB HD that shipped with the thing!
When I heard that sound, it reminded me of getting a filling. - I had an 8GB model and it was annoying but now I think I want one for the coolness factor.
I love getting back in time, our first HD was also an 5.25 inch. but that was in the 8086 era, preinstalled with DOS :) Later on i purchased an original bigfoot 10gb, slow as hell but they where affordable.
I remember these. Slower high capacity drives. Never had one though. I preferred the Quantum Fireball 3,5" They were very fast at the time. But the Bigfoot could be a very very durable drive, due to the big platter and lower RPM. Retro Rulez ! :)
The first one I saw came in a large 1997 HP Pavilion tower with a 233 MHZ Pentium II, 32 MB of ram, and Windows 98. When it failed during the PC's warranty period, dad called the number and an HP technician came to the house with a replacement. I'm pretty sure no one does that anymore for consumer hardware.
Bought one back in 2000 at a food discounter (!) nearby for around DM110. It was the TX12 Model with 12GB of capacity. The price was more than decent back then and I don't know why so many had problems with the soundlevel - there were more than enough louder harddrives, like some 3,5" Quantum FIREBALL 6.4GB models, some maxtors and even seagte. I even liked the formfactor - there were many towers or desktops around with only 1-2 3,5" HDD slots and many unoccupied 5,25" slots, so this was a perfect fit without extension brackets. Liked this one alot, however, the speed wasn't that great. Btw: Cache was 128KB at the 12GB model.
The 2.1 or 2.5GB ones sold in Compaq computers had a firmware issue that you had to fix with a patch from Compaq. It flashed new firmware in the drive that fixed some issues with them just crapping out.
still love hard drives - there is more engineering put in to making them than making ssd's or flash storage, people(scientists) tried harder to make something earlier than they do nowadays
I had one of these (or maybe still have - I haven't looked in my Parts Cabinet of Doom in a while). It was an OK performer for the time and worked pretty well with caching controllers which would compensate for the lengthy access times. In particular, I had a fairly advanced Tekram two channel VLB controller that was really good at write combining, and it did very well with older drives.
My Quantum Bigfoot HDD came with a sticker that reads: "thinkBIGGER" Yes it was spelled this way as one long word, think was in lower case BLUE and BIGGER was in UPPER CASE GREEN, much larger font as well. It's still stuck to my bedroom wall ;)
I was 16 when these came out, I saved up and put one the family computer (of which I was the only user). Went from 400 mb to 4 gb overnight, I never felt so rich :D
I remember my mom buying a Compaq Presario 5360 back in the late 90's after the eMachines crapped out....looking back on it it was either a PSW or motherboard issue. Anyways I remember having one of these or something similar in that Compaq which may have been a Maxtor but it was just as big as this one. At one point the computer had some issue and the tech replaced the drive with a 3.5" Western Digital which were both 10gb. Me being a tinkerer but not computer savy at the time took it apart once before it was done and after the tech worked on it and was like "where did the real hard drive go to??"
I got Quantum Bigfoot drives as well. With a whole whopping size of 2GB! :P Still, they're nice for retro rigs, ánd they are still up and running without bad sectors or anything. I think they should make harddrives like that again, now I have to use 3,5 inch to 5,25 inch converters to store more harddisks in my system .
Back in the nineties I had one of those drives. Got it from a trash pick, and was greatly disappointed. Huge 5.25" drive with a tiny 20 meg storage capacity.
I'm happy I never have to worry about loud drive's anymore reminds me of my old laptop with a 5 gig hdd is was loud so I managed too just steal it's magnets.
I bought one of the Bigfoot drives and never cared for it. Impressive because it was a lot of storage at the time but I think this was one of the slowest drives that I had owned.
Oh yea, still have at least one of these in a box somewhere. Only had it in a secondary pc years ago. I know in the day I never wanted a slow large arsed drive like the one in my 8088, so never bought one new, stuck with the 3.5" drives.
I remember that a few oddball computer chassi had slots for that unusual 5,25" 1/4 height unit size, perhaps most notably Compaq who also used that same size for some of their floppy drives.
Quantum sold their hard drive business to Maxtor in 2001, but they do still exist. For a long time, they had been the big name in enterprise tape libraries and drives. I worked for them for 6 years total, ending my employment with them in March of 2016. I worked as the sysadmin in their test labs in Colorado. They have tried making many other storage products, only to gain an "also ran" status in each, with less than 5% market share in most areas. I think the most recent attempts to break into markets are big data and surveillance video storage. I don't know if they've gained a foothold in either. The tape business with government departments seems to be the only thing keeping them afloat for the last 5 years or so.
Love the sound of these. The only drive I like the sound of more is a Seagate Cheetah. The Ultra-2 SCSI models were used by Maximum PC in at least one of their Dream Machines, if I recall correctly. I'd love to see a video on the Cheetah.
I also have two of these, a 2.1GB and a 3.75GB one, they're incredibly slow and loud. They only have like 4200rpm and a 64KILOBYTE cache (todays hard drives have 64MB and more) My two Quantum Bigfoots are still working fine tho :D
i have a Quantum ProDrive 425MB from 1991 and i don't know why but i love it in my Win98 machine. i think it's an advantage to hear what the HD is doing and to be honest, i don't notice that it'd be slow. i think it's extremely reliable and well made. i can't imagine any popular consumer HD manufactured in this millennium working as new 30 years from now. Still i don't quite understand the prices they go for today.
it's sad, the originals and the CYs were not known for reliability. the TX was a bit better, but the TS was where it was at-- up to 19 and change per drive formatted, if I remember correctly? and they were fairly fast with win9x. I did a video some time ago booting a PIII Compaq 6450? off an 8GB TS destined to run a cutting table in a production environment since the machine had dual ISA slots which was necessary for getting the table X and Y running. it replaced a lowly Pentium 66 and outperformed it with 256 megs of RAM available to it and was, from off to desktop, about 30 seconds flat, after doing some sort of F1 fix to the BIOS.
I used to cringe when a family member would ask me to help with their computer and I found out their computer had a bigfoot drive because it typically meant that they were (typically) the cheapest model of whatever brand computer they had purchased.... Not that the drives themselves were particularly bad but OEMs would get all the cheapest stuff in the machine to maximize their profit margin. companies do that now by pairing computers with larger mechanical drives running at 5400 RPM, 1TB sounds pretty good when this expensive one only has 250GB SSD...
I remember dropping one of these as a tyke on my father's foot. They're heavy enough to cause some serious bruising, lol. Though you're earning some serious finger wagging from me man, why are you holding that HDD by the PCB when installing it? Only complaint with the video, hope to see more!
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [1/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vLGjxFL6U_I/mqdefault.jpg)
Listen to that canning sound. I remember these well back in 2000.
My first want to be drive was going to be a quantum fireball 20Gb in 2000/2001 but the PC store was taking months to get one in and ended giving me a seagate 40GB for the same price. I was the envy of the school class as I had a 40Gb for $240 where most of the other kids best drivers were 15 to 30GB and paid over $300 for the 30GB models.
I did a similar "struck gold" with my 256MB of SD ram I bought for about 60-70 bucks when ram prices happen to tank and they sky rocketed to well over 200-250 bucks for the next 3 -4 years after that lol. I previously had 64MB 6 months earlier for $90, was such a win.
Oooh, they hum like angels! You're never lonely if you've got a Quantum Bigfoot TX Hard Disk Drive!
"Look this man, it's a Quantum Bigfoot TX 8GB, with IDE connection and molex power support, it even has an LED and nostalgic drive spinning sound, it literally blow your face off with his 5.25" profile"
DRUAGA1
Str1kernaut IT took me a while, but it's nostalgic not no standard.
GIMME THAT POWER, BIETCH!
OH MY GAD! And there is, the quantum bigfoot *floopy seek and bios sound*
"It'll make your optical drives nervous to be around!!!"
GIMME THE POWER BITCH
If there's one thing I don't miss about old computers it is the sound of harddrives.
Awesome. I literally bought one of these last week to make a video about it!
I'm looking forward to that video! :D
I cannot wait for the video on that! :)
Hey Nostalgia Nerd! Glad to see you here.
Good to see more youtubers are finding out about these beasts.
you misspelled "DAMN I WAS GOING TO DO A VIDEO ON THIS!" "RAAAAAAAARG"
MAN, those sounds made my heart flip. So many childhood memories!!
I worked in a PC store for a year (1997-1998) building and servicing machines. We did build some with Bigfoot drives in them as they were cheaper and boy did we regret it. We had used,
Seagate, Western Digital and Quantum 3.5 inch drives and didn't find much difference in terms of reliability. We did have a much higher return rate on the Bigfoots.
I put one in my new "sleeper" pc for that authentic hard drive sound!
A stroll down memory lane. I was in the business, back then, and distinctly remember having mounted in a PC a Bigfoot 5 inches FULL size. A proper BEAST. Normal ones had a capacity from 3.2 to 4Gb, the full size was about double.
I still own a Quantum bigfoot... And as of 6 years ago, when it was last used, it was still working
I STILL have my old Quantum Bigfoot! I kinda want to use it on a DOS PC build...It's the 4GB model. :) I miss that sound :B
Oh man, I had this exact same drive, it used to get swapped between several of my computers and so I never had any screws holding it in place...one day it slid out of a computer case and crashed onto the tiled floor. whilst I was walking through the kitchen, ..and that was the end of it. I really loved that noisy old quantum :)
I had one of these in my home-built PC when I was 15, like 21 years ago, the 1.2GB variant. The sounds bring back memories. Much nostalgia.
I'd like to see a lineup of big drives again.
They don't have to be extremely fast, just provide alot of storage for little money.
I agree, it would be really interesting to have as an option.
Though cases are starting to come without optical drive bays, so it might be an idea that wouldn't be so feasible in the future.
It's not nescessarily possible (bigger drives need thicker platters to reduce wobble/vibrations and tolerances are much higher today); but if you could make them as thin and with as many platters as a 10 TB helium filled drive (pretty affordable today) you'd get about 19 TB.
(The 5.25 inch drives of old had 5.12 inch platters, and 3.5 inch drives have 3.74 inch platters (!). The spindle hole is ~1 inch.)
soylentgreenb don't you mean 10 MB lol
@@pyeltd.5457 No he actually means 10 TB. Do you even know what a helium filled drive is? Or how SMR recording works for hard drives? I suggest you look it up.
@@soylentgreenb I think with 4 platters crammed into the Bigfoot form factor it would be around 35-46 TBytes with today’s data densities. In all honesty, this would be seemingly practical for archive storage I would think.
I had this exact same HDD in my old Pentium 200 MMX PC i bought back in 1997 when the 200 MMX had first released. At the time this HDD was the biggest capacity available, my brother-in-law used to call that PC of mine a Supercomputer lol. Funny how times change. Oh and at the time if i remember correctly we paid around $4200 for the PC, compared to my old 286SX PC we bought back in 1991 it was slightly cheaper (286SX cost us $5500 lol). Its funny looking back at classic Computer hardware and seeing how far we've come.
I still have my Bigfoot. It's like a time capsule now. From time to time I hook it up and let the memories flow.
Wow, that spin up sound brings back memories. Back some time in late 97 IIRC I bought a Compaq Presario 2256 with a 300mhz AMD K6, 48mb 66mhz ram, a 2mb S3 ViRGE onboard graphics chip, 4gb Quantum Bigfoot hard drive and Windows 95.
I have one from my families 1997 Hp pavilion, tested it in crystal disk info and it has bad sectors, My socked foot is on it right now, feels really cold on the sole of my foot, very soothing.
Found out about these from Druaga 1
Me too lol
yeah
TheLazyWanderer give me that power biatch
that video was great
"it's a quantum bigfoot man!"
OH hell naw big foot ain't no slave
I had a friend, back in the day, who had a 12 gb version. I remember it being the biggest (physically & capacity wise) hard drive I'd ever seen. Brings back memories.
I had totally forgotten about these. What a blast from the past.
I spent years in therapy trying to forget the Bigfoot drives :-P
My first PC, circa 1996, had a 2.5 GB Quantum Bigfoot drive installed. It did not have as fast of a spin-up time as the drive in the video. I remember it sounding impressive at the time. It was quite reliable though, surviving for many years as a secondary drive. The capacity finally ended its life, being too small for most things by the time I shelved it.
I recently pulled one of these from an old Compaq. I had no idea this was so unique.
Your channel makes old computer hardware and computing stuff interesting and engaging, great videos!
One of those who had one because of the price/storage cost.
Worked flawlessly and later sold it. Nowadays M2.Nvme and 2.5" external drives
found 2 of these at my local recycling centre this week! they both work great!
I had one of these. It was 10 gb and I used it as a massive flash drive in a USB drive sled. Took it to class in college with my files on it.
oh man, I remember these. while slow they did have a good price. it did fill a nitch market for a little time. fun stuff.
Woo had a couple of these back in the day and recently got my hands on one. Have not used it yet. Thanks to you Phil I just built my first retro gaming PC, a Pentium 2 300Mhz on a dual P2 mobo with a terminator in the other slot, 256MB Ram, 8GB Maxtor HDD that is quiet and works perfectly (amazingly), paired with a GeForce 4 MX440. Not a super fast card but seems plenty fast for the P2. I also just put a dual (dual core) Opteron system together with a nVidia 9800GT video card 4G of RAM, and have parts on the way to build a Slot 1, dual Pentium 3. I would not have bothered with dual P3's for Windows 98, but the mobo a friend game me was dual slot 1 and I didn't have a terminator. Cheers man, you and your web site have been fun, helpful and inspiring to relive the old days. :D
Super cool. Reminds me of the Seagate 5mb MFM drive my father's Leading Edge used to use. I didn't know there were companies that continued to try to use the 5.25" bay.
Loved Quantum 3.5" drives - found them to be very high quality with low failure rate - I did have a bigfoot in the day, it was considerably slower than their 3.5 inchers
"Wait a minute, this isn't a Maxtor. This is a QUANTUM BIGFOOT!"
Cudos for putting in that audio recording! I would have swore the one we had at the place I was working back then had a 2GB capacity, though it was a long time ago.
I had the 4Gb, and then the mahosive 12Gb, I still have the 12 in the loft, it served me well and I can't bring myself to throw it away. I like how it reminds me how storage has grown over the years.
I still have the habit of buying huge amounts of storage rather than deleting things, 12Gb was so much space back then, I'm up to 25Tb now, that's crazy and yet it's normal now.
I managed to get one of these just yesterday, a 12gb TS one. It's fun. Big boy.
I was building a retro rig for Windows 98 about ten years ago. Initially, I had an off-brand PCI sound card, but it gave me so many issues with its drivers, I swapped it out for a Sound Blaster AWE32. To make the AWE32 fit in my case, I had to permanently remove all of the 3.5" bays (by means of drilling out the case rivets). Now I was left with a system that only had its 5.25" bays, leaving me no place to mount my hard drive. The only solution (not really, but I was young and ignorant) was to find a 5.25" hard drive. Thus, I became acquainted with the 8gb Quantum Bigfoot. A perfect solution. The system worked perfectly. I still have it to this day. Not mentioned in the video: It actually has a hard drive access light built into the circuit board on the top of the drive. My old case had a plexiglass window on the top, so it was nice to see the drive light doing its thing.
Thanks for sharing! I totally missed that LED, I got to check it out again!
My first PC, a Peacock with a Pentium 120 and 16MB Ram had an 1.2 GB Quantum Bigfoot. It died within a week and I got another one under warranty. The replacement drive worked for years. No Idea where it is now. I don't recall it dying on me, maybe I gifted it to someone.
Man, that boot up sound is nostalgic. Mine was a first generation drive, so it spun a lot slower.
For the pun:
"A Quantum of Diskspace"
I also got one in my collection, should get it up and running again :D
I didnt know such drives existed, but I had idea, that platters would be larger, and then, sequential speed at the edge of the platter would be higher. That would lead to bigger sequential read/write speed. But I would let them to go 10000 RPM, that would lead to incredible sequential speeds. Anyway, more expensive solution was RAID. I think, that's the reason, why 3,5'' disks went more popular, anyone who wanted more, just used them in RAID, or with SCSI card.
I remember Quantum fondly. My first drive was a 350MB Quantum Lightning, and my next was a 4.3GB Quantum Fireball.
Had one of these in a pentium 2 computer, it was so loud, but it worked up to the day I had to sell the computer, and as far as I know it still works in someone else’s home. I had the computer up until 2021
The good old days. When the hard drive was the loudest thing in you PC - even in idle :)
Used a Bigfoot TX 8GB as my main system drive between 1998 and 2004. Still somewhere in my cupboard (the computer it was in died a long time ago).
My old hard drive from my first computer , and this sound
I owned a 4 GB Bigfoot drive back in the 90s which i used with my Amiga A1200, but i don't remember it being that loud. Anyway, due to limitations in the Amiga's O/S, i had to split it into two partitions of slightly less than 2 GB each. but it worked quite well that way.
IIRC Quantum is still in business but they only manufacture tapes for tape storage used in mainframes which are still used by the military and banks
I do have a Quantum drive in my P100 but is a Fireball instead of a Bigfoot (I had a 2 GB Bigfoot and it was so slow loading Windows 98)
Rodoko Thanks for the correction!
Of nothing, you are welcome :3
Yeah that's correct. I work with quite a few clients who still have Quantum LTO-4 tape drives.
I had one of these in my "tricked out" Packard Bell 486SX33 with 36MB RAM (4MB onboard, and a 32MB SIMM). It was a fantastic upgrade to the 200MB HD that shipped with the thing!
Had a 4gb version in a Pentium 166 (with MMX) back in 1997, was a serious piece of kit!
When I heard that sound, it reminded me of getting a filling.
- I had an 8GB model and it was annoying but now I think I want one for the coolness factor.
Wow. Definitely needs a big solid steel desktop (as opposed to tower) case for that loud echoey old school desktop PC HDD sound!
I love getting back in time, our first HD was also an 5.25 inch. but that was in the 8086 era, preinstalled with DOS :)
Later on i purchased an original bigfoot 10gb, slow as hell but they where affordable.
I remember these. Slower high capacity drives.
Never had one though. I preferred the Quantum Fireball 3,5" They were very fast at the time.
But the Bigfoot could be a very very durable drive, due to the big platter and lower RPM.
Retro Rulez ! :)
The first one I saw came in a large 1997 HP Pavilion tower with a 233 MHZ Pentium II, 32 MB of ram, and Windows 98. When it failed during the PC's warranty period, dad called the number and an HP technician came to the house with a replacement. I'm pretty sure no one does that anymore for consumer hardware.
Bought one back in 2000 at a food discounter (!) nearby for around DM110. It was the TX12 Model with 12GB of capacity. The price was more than decent back then and I don't know why so many had problems with the soundlevel - there were more than enough louder harddrives, like some 3,5" Quantum FIREBALL 6.4GB models, some maxtors and even seagte. I even liked the formfactor - there were many towers or desktops around with only 1-2 3,5" HDD slots and many unoccupied 5,25" slots, so this was a perfect fit without extension brackets. Liked this one alot, however, the speed wasn't that great. Btw: Cache was 128KB at the 12GB model.
The 2.1 or 2.5GB ones sold in Compaq computers had a firmware issue that you had to fix with a patch from Compaq. It flashed new firmware in the drive that fixed some issues with them just crapping out.
still love hard drives - there is more engineering put in to making them than making ssd's or flash storage, people(scientists) tried harder to make something earlier than they do nowadays
I had one of these (or maybe still have - I haven't looked in my Parts Cabinet of Doom in a while). It was an OK performer for the time and worked pretty well with caching controllers which would compensate for the lengthy access times. In particular, I had a fairly advanced Tekram two channel VLB controller that was really good at write combining, and it did very well with older drives.
giant hard drive with excessive noise, perfect for that exclusive old machine.
my family's first PC had one of these in a Celeron 450Mhz machine before I knew anything about hardware.
don't miss that noise
My Quantum Bigfoot HDD came with a sticker that reads:
"thinkBIGGER"
Yes it was spelled this way as one long word, think was in lower case BLUE and BIGGER was in UPPER CASE GREEN, much larger font as well.
It's still stuck to my bedroom wall ;)
I was 16 when these came out, I saved up and put one the family computer (of which I was the only user). Went from 400 mb to 4 gb overnight, I never felt so rich :D
I bought a 2.1gb in 1998.. it served me for many years!
I had one of 4GB just like in the video, but without the HP branding. Was pretty cool.
I remember my mom buying a Compaq Presario 5360 back in the late 90's after the eMachines crapped out....looking back on it it was either a PSW or motherboard issue. Anyways I remember having one of these or something similar in that Compaq which may have been a Maxtor but it was just as big as this one. At one point the computer had some issue and the tech replaced the drive with a 3.5" Western Digital which were both 10gb. Me being a tinkerer but not computer savy at the time took it apart once before it was done and after the tech worked on it and was like "where did the real hard drive go to??"
I got Quantum Bigfoot drives as well. With a whole whopping size of 2GB! :P Still, they're nice for retro rigs, ánd they are still up and running without bad sectors or anything. I think they should make harddrives like that again, now I have to use 3,5 inch to 5,25 inch converters to store more harddisks in my system .
I had one in my really first own bought PC in 1998...the sound was awesome. :)
aaahhhh.. the sound do brings back memory
back in the time i am poor so i get some bigfoot, and only my main drive is a faster quantum
Back in the nineties I had one of those drives. Got it from a trash pick, and was greatly disappointed. Huge 5.25" drive with a tiny 20 meg storage capacity.
I use these on my Power PC G3 Mac's. Lovely sound.
I'm happy I never have to worry about loud drive's anymore reminds me of my old laptop with a 5 gig hdd is was loud so I managed too just steal it's magnets.
I bought one of the Bigfoot drives and never cared for it. Impressive because it was a lot of storage at the time but I think this was one of the slowest drives that I had owned.
Nice! I really like the Bigfoot because of the noise it makes. :)
Those are pretty cool! They should have kept making them.
Hey I had one of these back in the days. Can't say I was ever crazy about it. Then again I don't have harsh memories of it either.
Oh yea, still have at least one of these in a box somewhere. Only had it in a secondary pc years ago. I know in the day I never wanted a slow large arsed drive like the one in my 8088, so never bought one new, stuck with the 3.5" drives.
Of course I do.
*Druaga1 and windows me intensifies*
I remember that a few oddball computer chassi had slots for that unusual 5,25" 1/4 height unit size, perhaps most notably Compaq who also used that same size for some of their floppy drives.
Quantum sold their hard drive business to Maxtor in 2001, but they do still exist. For a long time, they had been the big name in enterprise tape libraries and drives. I worked for them for 6 years total, ending my employment with them in March of 2016. I worked as the sysadmin in their test labs in Colorado. They have tried making many other storage products, only to gain an "also ran" status in each, with less than 5% market share in most areas. I think the most recent attempts to break into markets are big data and surveillance video storage. I don't know if they've gained a foothold in either. The tape business with government departments seems to be the only thing keeping them afloat for the last 5 years or so.
Love the sound of these. The only drive I like the sound of more is a Seagate Cheetah. The Ultra-2 SCSI models were used by Maximum PC in at least one of their Dream Machines, if I recall correctly. I'd love to see a video on the Cheetah.
I had a bigfood hdd back the days and l love the look and the noise! Thanks for the asrm audio capture of it :-)
The noise certainly is lovely ain’t it? :) kinda miss noisy disks
Love it, my first computer has a QUANTUM BIGFOOT 1.2GB.. thanks for the sound !!!
i love the sounds of holder hard drives.
My current hard disk drives from 2016 are silent yay.
I also have two of these, a 2.1GB and a 3.75GB one,
they're incredibly slow and loud.
They only have like 4200rpm and a 64KILOBYTE cache (todays hard drives have 64MB and more)
My two Quantum Bigfoots are still working fine tho :D
Slow and loud, but clearly reliable :)
I still have Quantum Bigfoot 5.25 and 2.1 GB only. 22 years old and still working...
i have a Quantum ProDrive 425MB from 1991 and i don't know why but i love it in my Win98 machine. i think it's an advantage to hear what the HD is doing and to be honest, i don't notice that it'd be slow. i think it's extremely reliable and well made. i can't imagine any popular consumer HD manufactured in this millennium working as new 30 years from now.
Still i don't quite understand the prices they go for today.
I LOVED my Quantum BigFoot
This damn thing is louder than my entire rig with fans on max.
I'm really surprised that you found one that works. I replaced a hundred of them when they were still in production.
Found one of these goodie just the week before. 1,2 blazing fast Gigabytes, and it´s still functional.
it's sad, the originals and the CYs were not known for reliability. the TX was a bit better, but the TS was where it was at-- up to 19 and change per drive formatted, if I remember correctly? and they were fairly fast with win9x.
I did a video some time ago booting a PIII Compaq 6450? off an 8GB TS destined to run a cutting table in a production environment since the machine had dual ISA slots which was necessary for getting the table X and Y running. it replaced a lowly Pentium 66 and outperformed it with 256 megs of RAM available to it and was, from off to desktop, about 30 seconds flat, after doing some sort of F1 fix to the BIOS.
I used to cringe when a family member would ask me to help with their computer and I found out their computer had a bigfoot drive because it typically meant that they were (typically) the cheapest model of whatever brand computer they had purchased.... Not that the drives themselves were particularly bad but OEMs would get all the cheapest stuff in the machine to maximize their profit margin.
companies do that now by pairing computers with larger mechanical drives running at 5400 RPM, 1TB sounds pretty good when this expensive one only has 250GB SSD...
My first hard drive, but i had the 1.2GB model.
I had one of these, my first Pentium 200 MMX i bought back in 1996 came with a 4GB Quantum Bigfoot drive
I remember dropping one of these as a tyke on my father's foot. They're heavy enough to cause some serious bruising, lol. Though you're earning some serious finger wagging from me man, why are you holding that HDD by the PCB when installing it? Only complaint with the video, hope to see more!
Ah, the Bigfoot. I have the CY 2160AT, with the classic Quantum seek test we all know :)
My Compaq 5020 came with the 8gb version of this drive way back in the day. The drive in mine was ridiculously loud, and got really hot.
I started crying hearing the random access :D
I have a Quantum Bigfoot 2550AT
from 1996 it works perfectly