anetanel wrote:I never heard of Connor drives. I guess they were not popular or even available here in Israel.
Conner was what I would call one of the "largest small manufacturers" of drives during the early to mid 90s, although they originally started back in the 80s. Not as well known as WD, Seagate, Maxtor or maybe even Quantum, but still enough of a contributor that their drives were semi-common depending on where you looked. A lot of my Toshiba portables from that time period use Conner drives (in fact, their BIOSes are hard-coded to accept ONLY Conner drives), I worked on at least one other 486 system back in the day that had a 250MB Conner drive installed, and IIRC some of the drives used in Macs during the early 90s were rebranded Conner SCSI drives. Seagate bought out Conner in 1996, so several Seagate drives from around that time are either rebranded Conners or new models based on Conner designs.
They were a budget brand, and it really showed, especially towards the end. IIRC some models had the top cover held on by foil tape instead of screws (I THINK the 850MB Conner drive I got in my 486 is like that), and performance lagged a little bit. Anecdotally, reliability with Conner seems hit-or-miss, although a majority of the Conner drives I have personally used seemed to work fine. The one in our childhood 486 eventually developed ~120MB of bad space according to ScanDisk back in the day, but modern-day experience with my rebuild of that system makes me think perhaps it was a controller issue and not a problem with the drive itself, so for all I know the drive itself in that childhood system could have been perfectly fine. The only Conner drive I've had RECENT trouble with was a 40MB model in one of my Toshiba portables not wanting to spin up, which I attribute to aged lubricant and thus could really happen to any old drive despite brand or model. Otherwise, all of the Conner drives in my collection that are currently in use are working fine.