Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s

Peter Corlett abuse at cabal.org.uk
Wed Jul 21 09:32:31 CDT 2021


On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 06:48:08AM -0500, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> Regarding your "IDE HDDs were extremely rare" comment, did *anyone* other
> than Quantum release an IDE drive in that 5.25" form factor? I can't think
> of any, everything else was 3.5", although some early vendor's drives were
> the same height as a "half height" 5.25" drive.

Not quite answering the question you asked, but optical drives from 15-25
years ago are 5.25" IDE devices.

Miniscribe also shipped MFM disks with an ATA adaptor board -- okay, IDE is
exactly that, but these were visibly discrete components -- although I can't
find an example of such a contraption which shipped with a 5.25" MFM disk.
It's likely that the adaptor board would "work" when transplanted onto a
5.25" disk, although getting it to properly handle the different geometry
may be challenging.

Given my failure to find a proper counterexample (not that I seriously
expected to find one), I agree that the Quantum Bigfoot was almost certainly
one of a kind. It was a niche product which only had a few years of
viability, and given that apart from capacity, Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) were
terrible drives, we'd have paid close attention to any competing drives and
would still remember them.



More information about the cctech mailing list