I had one of the infamous Quantum Bigfoots, I think I got the 2.5GB model; I distinctly remember liking it because it was an odd capacity for the time, because I've always been a hipster. Little did I know. It's one of the few drives I've had that actually failed in use and GOD was it slow & noisy.

A friend of mine bought a bunch of them (probably four) so he could stack them two-high per bay and make some kind of mutant file server thing with an ENORMOUS capacity for the time (ten or twelve WHOLE GIGS) in a compact AT minitower case on a teenager's budget. I wonder how long he ran that thing for.

I don't think they were particularly unreliable drives for their era, but they were built cheap & slow. I think I just had bad luck with mine.

On the other end of the scale, the dual 10k U160 Seagate Cheetahs in my Xeon build scream - in both senses of the word. 😜

computergeek92 wrote:

I never set hard drives to delay using the BIOS. Is it healthier for the drives to do so?

If your drive is properly detected on boot you don't need to set any delay. In the case of the drive I mentioned, if I don't set the delay the drive just doesn't get detected in time and it won't boot.

Many (most?) older drives need to spin up before they can be detected by the controller, but other than that you're fine without any delays.

It's pretty easy to tell if you look at a HDD's spec sheet - higher drive speed usually means a faster HDD. If I'm not mistaking these are 4200, 5400 and 7200 rpm, with some old scsi drives going as fast as 10000 rpm. There's also cache size - bigger is better. Some older drives have no cache whatsoever. Others have 512k, 1mb, 2mb etc. Another important factor sis the ATA standard the drive supports, and if it supports PIO or ultra DMA modes. There's standard IDE or ATA1, extended IDE (EIDE) or ATA2, Ultra DMA (ATA/33/66/100/133) or ATA4, and Ultra ATA - UATA or ATA5 - supporting 66, 100 and 133 MBytes/s over an 80 pin cable.

For older machines your standard EIDE drive is enough. These also support automatic drive geometry detection and run in one of four PIO modes. Sufficient for 386/486/pentium 1 machines. Regarding ATA1, I've never seen any such drives. I presume these were early IDE drives, 10, 20 to 40mb used in XT machines (those that used an IDE and not MFM interface). I don't think there's much of a chance to come across one of these.

For newer machines - slot 1 / skt 370 and super socket 7 you'd be best with a Ultra DMA or Ultra ATA drive. These newer drives come in various capacities from 2.something gb up to 500gb. These are more or less modern HDDs. It's also important to note what ATA standard your motherboard supports - most socket 7 / slot 1 boards and some early socket 370 boards support only ATA66 drives. Later socket 370 boards and socket a / 478 boards supdort UltraATA with speeds up to 133 MBytes/s (Ultra ATA/133).

As for specific brands/models, it's a tossup really. Since small / old HDDs can't be had new, an older drive will probably perform worse then a newer one (keep in mind mechanical parts wear over time) so even if drive X was waster then Drive Y when they were new, if drive y is newer / less used it might now be faster then X.

After Phils tests using SATA adaptors I've all but given up on using old HDD's. Even crappy SATA drives will be held back by older PC's
I've got a small stockpile of IDE and SATA drives, all pulled from old work computers so varying levels of wear, sizes, quality. For the moment I'll match IDE with IDE PC's but wont be upset once I run out.

BUT (always a but) I'm not a fan of overlay software, just doesn't feel right. Got a few 6GB and 8GB drives for my 2 486's which is what they both max out at. Will be sorry when I run out of those.

SCSI on the other hand 🙁 whole new ball game!

Around this time I bought a 13GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 6800. It was 7200rpm and one of the fastest ATA drives around according to StorageReview.

I sold it in a system last year, still going strong!

Regarding the GXPs, I had two 75GXPs go bad on me but the 60GXPs that replaced them were fine.

I really like the Quantum designed Maxtor D740X-6L series hard drives. They are 7200RPM ATA133 drives that sound great and perform fairly well for being an old IDE drive.

However, I don't plan on buying any more mechanical HDDs. Once my stock of salvaged IDE spinners runs out I'm moving towards compact flash and SD based IDE devices for my retro rigs just as PCL does.

I used to have a deathstar. Found it in the trash and it still worked! 😁
Then I used it in a rig and soon after it died 🤣!

I really liked it before it died.

Deskstars (at least the latest IBM-branded ones and most of the Hitachi ones) support user-configurable APM (idle low-RPM spindown + head parking) and AAM, so they may be worth searching out if that matters to you.

Both my old laptops are running Travelstars, and three out of my four "retro" desktops use Deskstars in the 40-250GB range, for this reason. Haven't had any problems with them...

I actually had a few of the 75GXPs, and only one of them ever carked it on me, but it was kinda luck of the draw. I didn't have terribly aggressive cooling, and I was using them with a dodgy power supply on the somewhat dodgy base power grid. Probably sheer dumb luck. ISTR that they were made in a few different countries, though, and one of them wasn't affected by the problem. IIRC it was the drives made in Canada that were OK; at any rate all the ones I had (and maybe have, I might still have one in storage) were Canadian except the one that died, that was made in (IIRC) Hungary.

They were pretty zoomy, though!

Nowadays, I don't usually futz with vintage disks - they are by far the component most likely to cause problems (other than possibly optical drives).