The restless spirits of mentioned Pakistani family have returned and are demagnetizing your bigfoots disks surface, Booo...!

Jokes aside, i have similar problem with one of mine SCSI Conner CP30200, the longer it runs the more bad sectors it generates, something is causing it to demagnetize, opened up the cover, found nothing suspicious, it had typical "scratched" surface of old design HDDs. Maybe somebody could shed some light onto this topic?

I've got a 6.4 gig version of that drive in my P166 - When I worked in a PC store in the 90s I recall these drives weren't particularly reliable, but this one is acting as a secondary drive (for games) - Checks out OK no bad sectors. I had a 130 Mb Maxtor drive die last month in the same way yours is dying - 2Mb of bad sectors turned into like 4 or 5 after repeated scans.

Generally Quantum (prodrive, ELS, fireball) were great drives - I only have one that I can't bring back up but it might be a SCSI deal - My Barracuda works fine though. I have no idea how I'm going to test it, as the last time I saw a 50 pin SCSI card (other than my 1540) was close to a decade ago.

Turn it into a clock:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/c1/ … 8ad3912a339.jpg

cj_reha wrote:

Were Quantum drives this quick to fail?

Why "quick"? That drive must be around ~20 years old at this point. For a device designed to realistically last 3-5 years (and a budget model to boot, being a Bigfoot), it doesn't seem particularly surprising that yours is in this state.

cj_reha wrote:

Were Quantum drives this quick to fail?

The three I've owned all worked fine for over a decade (in fact, two still work fine after close to 2 decades - I sold the other one 10 years ago)

$50 for an old hard drive is just insane.
I don't even pick them up for 1-2 euros. Got plenty of 2003-2005 era drives that seem much better (noise, speed, etc).

Sometimes when you wipe completely a drive with bad sectors a few times they disappear. My 270MB quantum HDD has like 4 or 5. After wiping it once with killdisk, I got 3 left and after 1 or 2 runs of killdisk, they were all gone. I don't know if they will be usable forever but for now, scandisk doesn't see anything even though I did that 4 or 5 month ago

SW-SSG wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Were Quantum drives this quick to fail?

Why "quick"? That drive must be around ~20 years old at this point. For a device designed to realistically last 3-5 years (and a budget model to boot, being a Bigfoot), it doesn't seem particularly surprising that yours is in this state.

Yeah, I should've probably reworded that. I meant how quickly it started to and is still failing, like within the period of an afternoon. It is such an old drive I am slightly unsuprised, but still it seems to be faicing quick.

Deksor wrote:

Sometimes when you wipe completely a drive with bad sectors a few times they disappear. My 270MB quantum HDD has like 4 or 5. After wiping it once with killdisk, I got 3 left and after 1 or 2 runs of killdisk, they were all gone. I don't know if they will be usable forever but for now, scandisk doesn't see anything even though I did that 4 or 5 month ago

This is a good point. If you don't mind wiping and starting over, you can DBAN the drive and see if it helps.

If you're really interested in saving the drive, a SpinRite level 4 scan might help. It costs $90, but you can use it on every drive you own, so if you save a few drives, it paid for itself.

Why are these drives sought after? They can't be mounted in the usual drive cages and force you to waste a 5.25" bay. Is it just the oddness factor?

Errius wrote:

Why are these drives sought after? They can't be mounted in the usual drive cages and force you to waste a 5.25" bay. Is it just the oddness factor?

I guess 🤣

An additional problem is that the 5.25" bays aren't designed to host hard drives so aren't designed to be cooled by the system fans. Whenever I mount a drive there I always put it in a fan-cooled drive enclosure. If this isn't done I expect it will reduce the life of the drive due to overheating.

Jed118 wrote:

Generally Quantum (prodrive, ELS, fireball) were great drives - I only have one that I can't bring back up but it might be a SCSI deal - My Barracuda works fine though. I have no idea how I'm going to test it, as the last time I saw a 50 pin SCSI card (other than my 1540) was close to a decade ago.

There are plenty of 50-pin ISA and PCI SCSI cards on eBay for only a few bucks. You can also get a 68-pin to 50-pin adapter, but that will probably cost more than the card!

I have 2 Bigfoots (bigfeet?) They are a minor collectible. Mine still work as far as I know, though it's been years since I've powered them on. They use standard IDE/PATA and such that Presario that used them could easily be upgraded to a faster, normal hard drive.

I guess i'll be the odd one here and say I never had any trouble with mine. I had a compaq 4800 series and the original drive was completely solid. For some reason I dismantled the computer and tossed the drive, but that was a long time ago when I was very young and very stupid.

I inherited a 6GB Quantum Bigfoot TX drive from some guy I don't know giving me an old retro system I didn't really want because I was looking for an old ATX case for an even older Pentium system I wanted to put together in a home. It works perfectly fine and has Windows 98 on it, an AMD K6-2 300MHz processor, and 64MB of SDRAM. I assume this is a standard Socket 7 board because of the lack of AGP slot and no 100MHz support. Good for an early Windows 98 gaming system if I put a Voodoo2 card in there. If it goes dead, I have a 40GB Western Digital 3.5" drive sitting on a shelf I can use.

My bigfoot in my P100 (166 now) finally had the clicks of death.

RIP. Replaced with a traditional Western Digital.

I have had a quantum bigfoot drive for a long time, but I thought it was extremely slow hard drive so I have never ended up using one in any retro builds.

I have a 2.1GB Quantum Bigfoot drive that still works (in a Compaq Presario 2100), it even has a Compaq OEM installation of Windows 95 RTM (surprisingly not OSR2 despite being manufactured in early 1997), I made a VHD backup of it just in case it dies, I also have four Fireballs that still work (their capacities are: 6.4GB, 8.4GB, 30GB, and 40GB). However, I did have another 8.4GB Fireball die on me due to magnetic (nearby speaker) damage back in 2014.

They're really slow drives, even for their time. Recommend replacing with a CF or SD card + CF/SD to IDE adapter.