Soundguy
Old Timer
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2002
- Messages
- 51,575
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- Central florida
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Quantum Fireball HDD\'s aptly named
Well. had one of the HDD's go south on my wifes computer this weekend.
I was in the middle of updating virus deffs from symantec and computer hung... reboot showed the dreaded primary master/slave controller failure. ( master was an older 1996 1.6gig WD, slave was a newish 2001 10gig QFB .. secondary controller had a Cd and CDR on it.. and was unaffected ).
My first thought was that the older WD had given up the ghost as i heard a good amount of racket coming from the HDD bays when powering up.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find it was the newer QFB. So far, in my computer experience.. I've only ever seen one western digital drive die*.. and it was an old type 17 ( 40 meg) drive back in the old 286 days, and it was on a friend's clients' computer. ( Only one IDE that is ). I've personally had an older 140meg conner HDD die, but only after I had used it for years, retired it, and then loaned it to a friend to use in his 486. It ran there for over a year and died.. course.. he moved quite often.. so the drive got to see lots of 'action'. The QFB 5 1/4" footprint in one of my home computers ( old pentium 3 - 400mhz system ) Has hung and not re-nooted immediatly a few times, though ( knock on wood ) is still spinning. ).
I've never had a maxtor, or seagate drive die onme either.. but then.. I try to use mostly WD drives.
I generally refurbish my old computers and send them to school with my wife. She sets up computer workstations in her class ( elementary and middle school ) and lets the kids run educational games on them. So far I've got about 4 boxes setting in her class right now. All are using older hdd's This last one I just built has an AMD k6-266 processor, a wd 1080 meg drive, a maxtor 340 meg drive, and a WD 202meg drive, plus a cdrom. The 1080 meg drive was in the system when I put it together.. the two other smaller drives I had setting in external drive enclosures ( H45 ) and were running them on parallel ports. That's old news now with USB drives.,. etc.
I think my oldest system in her room was an old 486 that I dropped in the pentium 83 overdrive chip. bus acrchitecture is VESA/local bus, and I believe it has 24 megs of 30-pin simm memory in simm stacker cards, as that old board only had 4 simm slots. It is also running some vintage HDD's a maxtor 540 from about 93 and another older WD that I had laying around unused from an upgrade to my old dial in style BBS.. also early to mid 90's.
Guess whatever supplier that is making the quantum drives.. um.. needs some help...
Wow.. this is almost getting nostalgic. I'm thinking back to the old days of hardware mods for speed.. and trying to stretch the limits on things. overcrystalling, and later, overclocking.
Also.. old MFM and RLL drives. And those neat perstore controllers.. double the drive space.. half the HDD life!
serial networks.. arcnet network cards (I liked thomas conrad cards.. etc ).. go back farther to the baby box computers like comedore, and color computers.. and slant4 trs-80 etc and there were tons of mods you could do.. stereo SID chips.. ram and serial packs. 1mhz patch for the commie 64.. etc
Just for fun me and frineds would find old salvage computer parts and try to interface them to different systems. I remember an old NEC laptop I had.. v-30 processor.. and it had an external drive controller.. we found and hooked up a dual 8" floppy. Used driveparm from old MS-DOS to make it work..
I remember when we moved the BBS system onto my shiny new 286-16.. we bought a 'large' ide drive for it... and the bios on the 286 wouldn't support it. had to get an add on ide host card with bios. You had to use debug to program in the drive paramaters for the card... neat stuff..
Early SCSI and ESDI stuff was neat too. I remeber when media was so expensive that refurbed media was a big seller. We picked up a few fujitsu 3+ gig drives ( big money back then.. even for refurbed media ).. took all night to format those drives.. and the adaptec card was a full lenght card.. don't see much scsi stuff any more. Someone gave me one back inthe 486 pre-win 3.x days. I had it running on an 8 bit card. Used it as extra storage. I tried it on one of those SB-16 cards that had a scsi port on it.. but the drivers never worked under dos. when win-3.x came out I thought it was fairly neat that windows automaticall picked up on the embedded scsi controller in the sb card. Drive was swapped over to it fo an immediate performance increase.
Serial stuff was just as fun. Nothing had 16550 uarts on it, and they were hard to find. 16450's with defective fifo buffers were a big buzkill.. and really no better than 8250's. I can rememebr desoldering lots of 16450's and socketing cards for 16550 uarts.. got fairly good at it.
I think the strangeist thing we ever cobbled was an older computer system ( tandy r series ) that only had one expansion port .. it was a 16 bit port, but use a weird riser card that let you install 3 cards into it, by turning them sideways. Course it only accomodated tandy half heigth half length cards. We took an old card.. literall hacksawed off the bottom pin edge connector, and made a jumper with ribbon cable.. and soldered it on the the pin edge. Then we gutted an old mainboard for its card slot section.. again.. hacksaw in action. soldered the ribbon cable onto the backplain and was way surprised to find that it worked. Those 4 or 5 extra cards sat uncerimoniously in a shoebox next to the computer...
well.. gotta get to work and stop 'remembering'....
oh yeah.. back to the point... QFB drives just fell a few notches in my book...
Soundguy
Well. had one of the HDD's go south on my wifes computer this weekend.
I was in the middle of updating virus deffs from symantec and computer hung... reboot showed the dreaded primary master/slave controller failure. ( master was an older 1996 1.6gig WD, slave was a newish 2001 10gig QFB .. secondary controller had a Cd and CDR on it.. and was unaffected ).
My first thought was that the older WD had given up the ghost as i heard a good amount of racket coming from the HDD bays when powering up.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find it was the newer QFB. So far, in my computer experience.. I've only ever seen one western digital drive die*.. and it was an old type 17 ( 40 meg) drive back in the old 286 days, and it was on a friend's clients' computer. ( Only one IDE that is ). I've personally had an older 140meg conner HDD die, but only after I had used it for years, retired it, and then loaned it to a friend to use in his 486. It ran there for over a year and died.. course.. he moved quite often.. so the drive got to see lots of 'action'. The QFB 5 1/4" footprint in one of my home computers ( old pentium 3 - 400mhz system ) Has hung and not re-nooted immediatly a few times, though ( knock on wood ) is still spinning. ).
I've never had a maxtor, or seagate drive die onme either.. but then.. I try to use mostly WD drives.
I generally refurbish my old computers and send them to school with my wife. She sets up computer workstations in her class ( elementary and middle school ) and lets the kids run educational games on them. So far I've got about 4 boxes setting in her class right now. All are using older hdd's This last one I just built has an AMD k6-266 processor, a wd 1080 meg drive, a maxtor 340 meg drive, and a WD 202meg drive, plus a cdrom. The 1080 meg drive was in the system when I put it together.. the two other smaller drives I had setting in external drive enclosures ( H45 ) and were running them on parallel ports. That's old news now with USB drives.,. etc.
I think my oldest system in her room was an old 486 that I dropped in the pentium 83 overdrive chip. bus acrchitecture is VESA/local bus, and I believe it has 24 megs of 30-pin simm memory in simm stacker cards, as that old board only had 4 simm slots. It is also running some vintage HDD's a maxtor 540 from about 93 and another older WD that I had laying around unused from an upgrade to my old dial in style BBS.. also early to mid 90's.
Guess whatever supplier that is making the quantum drives.. um.. needs some help...
Wow.. this is almost getting nostalgic. I'm thinking back to the old days of hardware mods for speed.. and trying to stretch the limits on things. overcrystalling, and later, overclocking.
Also.. old MFM and RLL drives. And those neat perstore controllers.. double the drive space.. half the HDD life!
serial networks.. arcnet network cards (I liked thomas conrad cards.. etc ).. go back farther to the baby box computers like comedore, and color computers.. and slant4 trs-80 etc and there were tons of mods you could do.. stereo SID chips.. ram and serial packs. 1mhz patch for the commie 64.. etc
Just for fun me and frineds would find old salvage computer parts and try to interface them to different systems. I remember an old NEC laptop I had.. v-30 processor.. and it had an external drive controller.. we found and hooked up a dual 8" floppy. Used driveparm from old MS-DOS to make it work..
I remember when we moved the BBS system onto my shiny new 286-16.. we bought a 'large' ide drive for it... and the bios on the 286 wouldn't support it. had to get an add on ide host card with bios. You had to use debug to program in the drive paramaters for the card... neat stuff..
Early SCSI and ESDI stuff was neat too. I remeber when media was so expensive that refurbed media was a big seller. We picked up a few fujitsu 3+ gig drives ( big money back then.. even for refurbed media ).. took all night to format those drives.. and the adaptec card was a full lenght card.. don't see much scsi stuff any more. Someone gave me one back inthe 486 pre-win 3.x days. I had it running on an 8 bit card. Used it as extra storage. I tried it on one of those SB-16 cards that had a scsi port on it.. but the drivers never worked under dos. when win-3.x came out I thought it was fairly neat that windows automaticall picked up on the embedded scsi controller in the sb card. Drive was swapped over to it fo an immediate performance increase.
Serial stuff was just as fun. Nothing had 16550 uarts on it, and they were hard to find. 16450's with defective fifo buffers were a big buzkill.. and really no better than 8250's. I can rememebr desoldering lots of 16450's and socketing cards for 16550 uarts.. got fairly good at it.
I think the strangeist thing we ever cobbled was an older computer system ( tandy r series ) that only had one expansion port .. it was a 16 bit port, but use a weird riser card that let you install 3 cards into it, by turning them sideways. Course it only accomodated tandy half heigth half length cards. We took an old card.. literall hacksawed off the bottom pin edge connector, and made a jumper with ribbon cable.. and soldered it on the the pin edge. Then we gutted an old mainboard for its card slot section.. again.. hacksaw in action. soldered the ribbon cable onto the backplain and was way surprised to find that it worked. Those 4 or 5 extra cards sat uncerimoniously in a shoebox next to the computer...
well.. gotta get to work and stop 'remembering'....
oh yeah.. back to the point... QFB drives just fell a few notches in my book...
Soundguy
