MarkP wrote on 2022-11-26, 20:55:
the3dfxdude wrote on 2022-11-26, 19:21:
And I've seen plenty of the bigfoots die, many because of age just sitting there. Quantums are known for unreliability from their poor manufacturing. I would not wish the OP to gamble on acquiring one. I can dig around to see if I have any left, but the prognosis is not good.
YOUR mileage may vary. Mine I'm pretty happy with then in MY systems for the last 7 years or so.
A couple of days ago I did a full installation of Xandros Linux 3 Deluxe to show have you can give it a Win9x look n feel. The installation went without a hitch and on reboot come up to the GUI login prompt without issue, logged in an in about 10mins had the Xandros desktop looking win9x. Go see the thread using XP as year main OS thread if you don't believe me.
That's good you have a working quantum. But there is no reason to make this into a conversation about believing you. If you saw in my message you replied to, I said I could dig and see what working ones I have left. I probably have a working one right now too! I stuck them into computers years ago and gave away the remaining working ones a long time ago cause I just don't have room for stuff I can't use. I can't be sure where they ended up. The ones I kept, some have died because of their known defect in the actuator stoppers disintegrating. They just do. That is why I've mentioned it is a gamble with old drives at this point. I've probably had 50 quantum drives from that time period. The reason why I got them is 25 years ago some companies out here decided after failures just replace ALL of their quantum drives. They were not good. Their drives of this size from around 97 or later is where the problems got bad for them. Maybe their earlier drives are better, because that is when they were popular. After then, there is a reason quantum exited the hard drive business completely.
If you want a vintage drive to make some noise, my advice is to try not pay any money for it. If you get one you like, great, but be ready since they could have a really bad whine from that era, or really that they aren't really the head seeking noise you are hoping for because they are too new and pretty quiet. Or get one from someone you know and get a good deal for it and tested it for you. It's not only quantum that had bad manufacturing runs either so pick your poison. Your best luck will probably be to start looking as small size as possible. Maybe there could be a 1-2GB out there from hopefully a reputable model. But don't pay any money for it.