VOGONS


First post, by Baoran

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I just wanted to make sure before trying. Are compaq branded hard drives with compaq part number just normal pata ide drives that can be used with any pc?
I have not played around with oem pcs much so I don't know exactly what parts are standard and which ones cannot be used with anything but the pc that it came with originally.

Reply 1 of 7, by dionb

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Compaq has used quite a lot of drive technologies over the years. It would help if you could give some examples of those part numbers, as it could be anything from MFM to SAS, although most will be PATA IDE or SCSI.

I might add that Compaq had excellent documentation so you should be able to look up the part number and get full specs on the drive.

Reply 2 of 7, by Baoran

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dionb wrote on 2020-10-26, 01:03:

Compaq has used quite a lot of drive technologies over the years. It would help if you could give some examples of those part numbers, as it could be anything from MFM to SAS, although most will be PATA IDE or SCSI.

I might add that Compaq had excellent documentation so you should be able to look up the part number and get full specs on the drive.

The one I am currently thinking of using is Part NO: 184150-001 because it would work well with those PCs that have 528MB hard drive size limit. I did try googling it, but got only a site that is selling them.

Reply 3 of 7, by Baoran

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Another reason why I thought it might be special drive in some way because it has that "replace with compaq spare" sticker on it. So I didn't want to break anything by just trying it with non-compaq pc.

Reply 4 of 7, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Think it's just a standard Seagate Medalist OEM for Compaq

https://web.archive.org/web/19961226124851/ht … ifs/appb-59.gif

https://www.seagate.com/support/disc/iguides/ata/3491aig.pdf

The 'replace with...' is more warranty-based than anything else (ignoring the price gouging!)

Reply 5 of 7, by eisapc

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Compaq used different drives from all manufaturers, even IBM and HP their greatest competitors delivered drives for Compaq.
While most desktop drives have only the Compaq Letters in their firmware drive identication string some server drives contained special firmware features like health data monitoring or raid optimizations.
There might be slightly different drive geometries between the original manufacture and Compaq OEM versions of the same drive.
This makes it sometimes difficult to find replacements for older Deskpros which do not have a custom drive geometry entry in their BIOS table.