My 486DX2-66 started out with a pair of Conners: a 240MB and 40MB. I don't remember when we got the 240MB, but both were inherited from an older 386SX.
Both of the Conners were quiet. I had to listen close to hear subtle clicks. I wished they were louder.
There's a strong correlation between a drive's seek noise and it's seek time, and Conners (at least those models) were on the slow end of the spectrum. I didn't hear bearing whine from them either, but after sitting around for ~20 years, maybe they'd be noisy if I plugged them in now.
The 40MB always had some funny issues getting along with newer hardware. To my memory it never worked with an EIDE controller.
Prior to that, it refused to work as a slave under the 240MB drive. Years later I saw an article on the Seagate web site (after they bought Conner) which showed an alternate, undocumented jumper config that it needed. This fixed the issue, but a bit too late to matter anymore.
Unfortunately I did not save that info anywhere (I wasn't organized about that kind of thing back then), and I seriously doubt there is any surviving documentation for a 40MB Conner hard drive on Seagate's web site today. I doubt Seagate even remembers that they own their product line.
In ~1996, rocking the 486DX2-66, I bought the first hard drive I bought with my own money. It was a 1.6GB Western Digital AC31600. I didn't know it wasn't period correct. 😀
To be fair, the 1.6GB did later land in a Cyrix 6x86.
See the thing is, I've never built a complete PC with all new parts bought on the same date. Do people actually do that?
PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:
WD Caviar x 3.jpg
They were all so much quieter than the SCSI units they replaced then, and even today they're still pretty quiet although the 1GB can be a bit 'sticky' after prolonged storage and the 1.6GB has a very slowly growing bad sector table so needs careful partitioning but still, not bad for 25 year old tech.
That Caviar 31600 is the same drive I bought. I think it was $350... amazing how much money I was willing to spend on PC hardware while making $4.35/hr.
It was the loudest (seek noise) IDE/ATA hard drive I've ever had. But I thought it sounded awesome. It was loudest and fastest when I loaded some kind of acceleration driver for our Acculogic EIDE VLB controller. I don't know exactly what that driver did, but it made a real difference. The hard drive was definitely faster and it had moments of sounding like a dialup modem transfer when it was loading some games.
Unfortunately the drive didn't last long. Mine had the same issue as yours - a slowly growing range of bad sectors. But mine started doing it within a year of purchase. It was the most expensive, most initially impressive, and most ultimately disappointing hard drive I ever bought. My first experience with hard drive failure.
