maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-09-08, 19:09:

Boohyaka wrote on 2021-09-08, 17:19:

I believe you are mistaken. It's only they had a single label, and a single manual, for the whole series of hard-drives and capacities, and offered the C/H/S settings on the label for convenience.

correct

This is the label with correct capacity on quantum drives.
The label on top is for information on the hdd series...
And the capacity of this one is 1080MB.

This printings is not "this can do...", rather it is listing of details for each model to save you from searching or calling some body else for the settings to input into the computer. The true model # is somewhere else on the hard drive. In this case usually a sticker on the IDE connector or somewhere else on the top.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-09-08, 19:52:

This printings is not "this can do...", rather it is listing of details for each model to save you from searching or calling some body else for the settings to input into the computer. The true model # is somewhere else on the hard drive. In this case usually a sticker on the IDE connector or somewhere else on the top.

Cheers,

Correct... see the previous post...
And the two labels of the same hard drive : 170MB

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-08, 16:45:

[...]

It will never be detected by a bios as being a bigger hd, even in an unlimited bios. Trying to configure it as a bigger hard drive results in loss of performance in exchange for greater capacity.

Even if you were correct on the capacity (which you are not, and has already been proven above), the "loss of performance" makes no sense.

Different settings can't magically add platters to the drive, the only way to get extra capacity would be higher density. That would increase (linear read/write) performance significantly, not decrease it.

is it april 1 already?

I guess there is a combination of BIOS bugs reading drive size incorrectly and confusion.
@SDumas and @pentiumspeed are right, the actual size/series model is not shown on the top label for these Quantum Fireballs.

BTW, downsizing drives to the maximum BIOS allowed was common back then.
And, very very long ago when there were only fixed HDD sizes ("types") sometimes it was the only way to use disk up to capacity by choosing a larger "type" with more tracks and then carefully set the partition size using SpeedStor etc. Aww there were bad things back then...

Now I had to learn way too much about WD Marvel based drives, for reasons, and can confirm that in the case of some 40GB models, they have all the same internal parts as 80GB versions and 40GB of them is "turned off". However, this being a later tech, there are many more "fudge factors" required to keep everything precise enough to read anything at all from their very tiny tracks, no room for error. All these go in a larger than previous EEPROM and are unique to each drive. Therefore, you ain't getting that other 40GB working without some factory level tools to characterise the platter and construct all the right fudge factors in the EEPROM. Even swapping PCBs between two 40GB or 80GB won't work out right for straight swap because they have their own unique fudge factors, so to do a recovery, you need to transplant the original EEPROM to a replacement PCB if that's what has fried. Anyhoo, with drives a generation or two less touchy and dumber, the same practices of building a crap load of drives all the same then binning them according to testing and market demand apply. Not needing so many fudge factors for more spread out data areas and bigger heads, it may be possible to unlock capacity.

How sad, I feel that my whole life I've lived a lie

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-08, 20:08:

How sad, I feel that my whole life I've lived a lie

Heh don't feel bad about it it's no big deal, happens to everyone 😁 today you learned something and that's all that matters!

Where you are going to find this most often is on drives that are half platter sizes of the X GB per platter tech in the drive lineup. If you look up the press release and see "These drives are based on 10GB per platter technology" which is something that seems to get boasted about in press releases, but then become hard to find in relation to drive specs, sometimes noted, sometimes not, then the 5GB and the 15GB are obviously using an odd number of sides. Drives that have an even number of sides probably only have that amount of platters installed.

Well, looks like I'm already late for the party, but here's my two cents:

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-08, 16:13:

Take this 3.2GB hard drive for example, it can be a 12.7GB hard drive

I'm afraid that your photo tells nothing about what model of your Quantum HDD is.

Like others have said: Those C/H/S specifications didn't mean "set those numbers in BIOS accordingly and you'll get that specific size of HDD," but "our HDD models look exactly the same from the outside; check the part number sticker on your HDD then find its specific C/H/S parameters within this generic label."

I've always hated these multi config labels on Quantum (and later on Maxtor-Quantum drives) and I had to check the real drive size on the small printing.

That one is correct model number. 4.3 AT means 4.3GB PATA/ATA.

Cheers,

The disturbing part is not the misunderstanding of the label, but that you "used this a lot for many years, with several hds, to accommodate content downloaded via p2p". No, you didn't 😀

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-08, 16:45:

When I bought it at the time, it was sold as a 3.2gb hard drive.

If at time you got a bargain like that (12GB new drive sold at "3.2GB" price) then the one who completely messed it was your seller, because he sold you only "3.2GB" to you on the actual price of a 12GB unit. In any case, it doesn't change the fact it is a 12GB unit with "capacity limit" jumper to use it with older machines which BIOSes would crash otherwise while detecting it (BIOS limit fault).

If your story is real, you can consider yourself lucky 😀.

konc wrote on 2021-09-09, 07:13:

The disturbing part is not the misunderstanding of the label, but that you "used this a lot for many years, with several hds, to accommodate content downloaded via p2p". No, you didn't 😀

Yes, I really did. It was a 4GB drive, which became 8GB, I used it on a 300mhz celeron, and used it to store limewire content. But he was extremely slow
I'm going to try to replicate what I did years ago with this 3.2gb drive and record to video

hyoenmadan wrote on 2021-09-09, 15:42:

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-08, 16:45:

When I bought it at the time, it was sold as a 3.2gb hard drive.

If at time you got a bargain like that (12GB new drive sold at "3.2GB" price) then the one who completely messed it was your seller, because he sold you only "3.2GB" to you on the actual price of a 12GB unit. In any case, it doesn't change the fact it is a 12GB unit with "capacity limit" jumper to use it with older machines which BIOSes would crash otherwise while detecting it (BIOS limit fault).

If your story is real, you can consider yourself lucky 😀.

But I didn't say it was a 12gb drive , if you reread my first post, you will see that I refer to higher capacities as an "overclock" at the cost of loss of performance

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-09, 16:28:

I'm going to try to replicate what I did years ago with this 3.2gb drive and record to video

You'd better show the picture of P/N sticker on the bottom side of the PATA connector to confirm the model number like the way SDumas and I did.

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-09, 16:28:

Yes, I really did. It was a 4GB drive, which became 8GB, I used it on a 300mhz celeron, and used it to store limewire content. But he was extremely slow

How old were you when you did that? I'm not saying you're lying, but our memories from 20 years ago can become fuzzy as time goes by.

As mentioned above, there is NO PHYSICAL WAY you can just duplicate the capacity of a hard drive like that unless it was a mislabeled part that was accidentally sold as a cheaper, lower capacity model. Or where someone previously set the jumpers to limit the capacity to avoid BIOS compatibility and you then set them back to the original capacity.

Yes, there were some ways to slightly increase the available space on older drives by playing around with the density (like someone said above, by low-level formatting an MFM drive as RLL), but that came at the cost of reliability, not speed, and the increase was nowhere near that dramatic. Also it wasn't possible to do it in all cases, the drive had to be RLL certified to have 100% certainty. A similar thing could be done with floppies, like Microsoft's DMF disks that stored 1.6MB of data on 1.44MB disks, but those are also just formatting hacks.

What you're talking about here is on the level of "downloading more RAM" in the sense that there is no physical support in the media to store those additional gigabytes.

EDIT: I guess the manufacturer may have disabled some of the heads due to factory errors on some of the platters and sold it as a lower capacity model, and you found a way to enable those back... but I don't know if any HDD manufacturers ever did that, and re-enabling those heads would at least require tinkering with the firmware.

dormcat wrote on 2021-09-09, 17:17:

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-09, 16:28:

I'm going to try to replicate what I did years ago with this 3.2gb drive and record to video

You'd better show the picture of P/N sticker on the bottom side of the PATA connector to confirm the model number like the way SDumas and I did.

It has no stickers! But it is detected in the bios as 3.2gb