Look at this man! It's Quantum Bigfoot, it's Quantum Bigfoot TX 8GB's with IDE connection and molex power support It even has an LED and nostalgic drive spinning sound!! 😂 Man, I miss Druaga1
The first time I was really impressed by a hdd/storage upgrade was about a month ago, when i switched a (heavily used) old hdd with a sata ssd. Not the kind of comment one would expect here, but... FÜR DEN ALGORITHMUS!
I recently tested a PCI Sata controller in a Pentium II, just wanting to see if it still works (got it in a box with several of these cards a while ago) and added a cheap SSD that I had laying around. Well, I've never seen Win98 install and boot this quickly! (I installed it directly from the SSD, as the CD Rom in this P2 is broken)
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Indeed, in my experience, swapping a HDD for an SSD is *the* most impactful performance upgrade you can give to an older machine.
I still have two of those Quantum Bigfoot drives, IDE, one is 2.1GB, one is 3.75GB. They are awfully slow and very loud! But somehow I like the sound the head seeking does, it is so loud!
The first new PC I got in the mid 90s had a Bigfoot 1.2GB drive. I always liked it because it was very quiet, and it was way larger than anyone else in my circle had at the time.
My first hard drive upgrade was adding a 40GB Seagate drive to my Pentium II machine running Windows 98, that originally came with a 5 GB WD Caviar. It didn't originally go well, as the BIOS was freezing at the hard drive detection stage. It turned out that the machine suffered from the 33.8 GB limit stemming from the number of cylinders being represented as a 16-bit value. Fortunately I manage to find a BIOS upgrade for my motherboard on some magazine cover CD and that solved the issue.
@AmazedStoner I think you're confusing it with the 128 GB limit that stems from 28-bit LBA addressing. Besides, I'm pretty sure that I had two partitions on that drive at the time.
@ The format limit had nothing to do with it. Though that is actually much higher btw at around 2 terabytes if you use third party software or the command line to do it. The real problem was a known bug that would cause corruption when using scan disk without the appropriate patch.
I remember these being somewhat popular with the digital video editing crowd. I liked the concept. I remember one day being satisfied at understanding the drawback - higher seek latency from the head having to move further over the platter.
I had a 19.2 GB Bigfoot TS. It was huge for its time, and affordable. It only had a spindle speed of 4,000 rpm, while 3.5" drives did 5,400 rpm. 3.5" 7,200 rpm drives were also available, but they were expensive back then.
WDCTRL also required the BIOS to act as of one "cylinder" was reserved, or it wouldn't talk to it, and it expected ATA registers to reflect the last call to INT 13h. Because I remember what it took to get DOSBox-X IDE emulation to work with WDCTRL and Windows 3.1.
I'm afraid that my first Quantum Bigfoot experience was also my last. I bought one in the late 90s even though I had been told they were notoriously unreliable. I learnt first hand that its bad reputation was well earned. Mine broke down within weeks of purchase as it turned out that the controller board for it had a manufacturing error and an SMD component had fallen off (most likely due to a bad solder joint). It was quickly replaced with a Quantum Fireball of a similar size and I managed to transfer the data by replacing the controller board for the Bigfoot drive with one that was lying around at the computer store I worked at at the time.
I have a 1st gen bigfoot in my stash, I put it in a retro computer a decade ago for a while, I loved the loud sounds it was making. Must still be in a box somwhere in my basement lol.
Been cleaning out old boxes today and found my FIL's Bigfoot from an IBM machine, P/N CY21A013, same revision. And now this in my YT feed. Really starting to think we are in a simulation...
In 2020 when I upgraded my laptop from 1 512gb and 1 256gb SSD to 2 1TB SSDs. Previously it was a pretty smooth curve from 4 to 8 to 10 to 20 to 40 to 80 to 120 to 320 then 500gb drives. Of which my desktop in 2009 had 4. And it basically stayed like that with either regular hard drives or 240gb SSDs adding up to the same 2TB total capacity until 2020 when I got the 2x1TB drives and suddenly even my laptop could store as much data as my desktop it was so freeing.
My 286 Toshiba portable came with an 40M Conner HDD. When I first reinstalled dos, Win3.11, using Ontrack Disk Manager to wipe the HDD (yes, I got the parity virus), I find that the HDD was 80M but Toshiba recognized only two HDDs geometry: 20M and 40M. I installed the HDD with Ontrack and got access to all 80M. I felt that I never can fill the space, it was huge. I always used Ontrack driver to use 32bit Access for files and HDD in Win3.11, it was stable and compatible with all HDDs that I used, but I also find Micro House Fastdisk Driver to be very good as well. Later, I had 120M HDD on my 486 and I got an IBM 520M, I felt the same, I can never fill that HDD. But I upgraded to Win95... With Win98, I had an 4.2G HDD and upgraded to an 20G. And so on... Latest upgrade was from 2x2TB HDD + 1x240G SSD to 3x5TB HDDs + 1x750TB SSD on my actual computer. I am now at 30% space free...
I absolutely hate the Quantum Bigfoot drives with a passion. Everyone of them failed on me from the shortest time of five hours to the longest time of a month & a half of use (I personally bought three of them). From heads failing causing scratched platters to chips failing. I also had a lot of repair jobs from my customers that bought a system with those cursed drives. I started to treat Quantum as a unreliable company since.
From my collection of more than 30 vintage hard drives ranging from the first Seagate 10MB drive until the last IDE 320GB monsters the only drives that I have problems are of course Quantum drives.
When I found a new 1GB Quantum Bigfoot on clearance, it was mind-blowing to find anything for 10 cents per megabyte! But with such a large platter size and low rpm, the slow seek time and data rate were like, you want all those bootup icon files on your desktop today?
I had, and still have, a Compaq presario with a 386 and Windows 3.1 that currently has a 540MB hard drive. The first larger drive was my Eversham micros Windows 98 machine in 1998 that had first a 6.4GB drive then I installed a 12GB hard drive. I remember thinking that would be the largest drive I would ever need as I could never fill that. Now I have a machine with 18GB over multiple drives and I could easily use more.
Still got 4 of them big boys that are working good even after all those years. I loved those things when they were on the market. Yeah they were a bit slow but the price was good and they seemed reliable to me.
I first encountered one in a Compaq Presario from 1996. From what I understand, for a brief span of time it was more economical some how to use the 5 1/4 form factor for a hard drive. Not sure how that worked. The Big Foot was 2GB and was pretty slow. It was easy to upgrade to a more conventional and faster IDE drive
I don't remember what brand or model ours was, but I remember my stepdad installing our first one-gigabyte hard drive in 1997 and saying "we'll *never* run out of space on this thing!" 😆
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR well, that's the problem when your hdd is so large, that you can't backup everything. ;-) 1 GB was a crazy amount of space at that time.
I bought a Pentium PC in late 1994 which had a 540 MB hard drive. As I was always experimenting with stuff like Linux and OS/2 I quickly ran out of space and bought an 1 GB WD hard drive for around 800 DM, guess is must have been late 1995 or early 1996 which would fit with the price lists you showed. Also I remember I bought it at ESCOM which I think went bankrupt on 1996.
I worked at a computer store in the late 90's - early 2000's The BigFoot was a terrible drive. It was high capacity, but so slow. They had slower rpm's than competition; the larger disk meant higher seek times. There were other 5.25" drives on the market that had ~10 platters; these had like 1 or 2. This led to the lower MB/s. These were for people (and OEM's like Compaq) that just wanted to be able to say that they had a big drive. ZIP, JAZ, and tape drives were better for backups. Modern systems have lots of SATA ports, but IDE meant 2 (or maybe 4) drives / system back then. For most owners this was their only drive. Slow boot & application launch speeds. Just a terrible drive.
I had one of these drives - it was... slow. But much bigger and actually affordable as a storage drive vs. just about anything else comparable. I seem to remember 5MB/Sec transfers on sequential reads, and much much worse for random I/O. Not a good boot drive at all, but as a second drive for photo or, um, Linux ISOs, it wasn't a bad deal. I would be surprised to find any of the original drives still functional today, as they were kind of cheaply made too. (Program note: It's PLAT-TERS, short A, for English pronunciation. I know English isn't your first language, so not a criticism, just a tutor point.)
My first PC in around 1995/6 had a 540mb HDD and ran Win 3.1 fine but now I'm confused. Why didn't I have this problem? Or did you say it was not a problem in 386 enhanced mode? Upgrading not just capacity but to a 7200rpm drive was a big deal to me around 2000. Also, having so many options in the BIOS that could literally make the difference between a PC booting and not, without any explanation as waht any of them actually meant, was clearly a design flaw of PCs in that era.
If I remember correctly, Win3.x did not enable by default 32Bit Disk Accesss and 32Bit File Access. You need to enter in the settings and enable them (see the screenshot in the video where it says 16-bit mode for both disk and file access).
Ah, I see. I think that might be the "Megabytes" distortion, wether one speaks about Decimal Megabytes (MB) and Binary megabytes (MiB). Hard drive vendors typically advertise capacity in decimal bytes for their drive capacity, so multiplying by 1000, instead of 1024. So, a 540 (decimal) MB hard drive (540'000'000 bytes) would be 514'984'130 binary bytes, that's actually ~491 (binary) MiB. Although it's a bit more complicated in the explanation (www.os2museum.com/wp/how-to-please-wdctrl/ explains it more in detail), the Windows 3.1 FastDisk driver (aka 32-bit Disk Access, as Microsoft called it), was crashing on hard drives with > 1024 cylinders. I simplified it by saying, it was over 512 MiB, but it's actually even over 504 MiB, to be fully correct. My bad. Even so there was occasionally smaller capacity drives with >1024 cylinders, that was more often the case with the "bigger" drives above 504 MiB. And the calculation goes as follows: 1024 cylinders * 16 Heads * 63 Sectors per Track * 512 Bytes per sector = 528’482’304 binary bytes, or 504 MiB. So it is very likely, that your drive fell through, as it was below the magic boundary, hence not triggering the BSOD. It is of course as well possible, that your drive was in fact 540 (binary) MiB. But if you bought it like that, chance might be, the vendor had actually installed a patched driver as part of the factory install, similar to the Micro House product I showed, to overcome the limitation. Or ... 32-bit Disk Access was simply not enabled on your machine. Then now crash would arise, even with a bigger capacity hard drive.
i think i had the 4GB version of this that i used to run Windows 95 then later on 98 on a P200 with an odd amount of memory, i think 96MB RAM... It was a MASSIVE drive, but not an issue :)
Look at this man!
It's Quantum Bigfoot, it's Quantum Bigfoot TX 8GB's with IDE connection and molex power support
It even has an LED and nostalgic drive spinning sound!! 😂
Man, I miss Druaga1
I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who thought of Druaga when seeing this drive name. Good old times...
Slave it to the optical drive!? Oh hell nah! Bigfoot ain't no slave!
@@SamK4074 Give me the power, [__]! 🙂
The first time I was really impressed by a hdd/storage upgrade was about a month ago, when i switched a (heavily used) old hdd with a sata ssd.
Not the kind of comment one would expect here, but... FÜR DEN ALGORITHMUS!
I love it! Nothing beats SSD "Schwuppdizität" ^^
I recently tested a PCI Sata controller in a Pentium II, just wanting to see if it still works (got it in a box with several of these cards a while ago) and added a cheap SSD that I had laying around.
Well, I've never seen Win98 install and boot this quickly!
(I installed it directly from the SSD, as the CD Rom in this P2 is broken)
I'm running quiet some old machines off Compact Flash, because the HDs are getting rare.
Adds quiet some punch even to 30+ years old machines.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Indeed, in my experience, swapping a HDD for an SSD is *the* most impactful performance upgrade you can give to an older machine.
I still have two of those Quantum Bigfoot drives,
IDE, one is 2.1GB, one is 3.75GB. They are awfully slow and very loud! But somehow I like the sound the head seeking does, it is so loud!
The first new PC I got in the mid 90s had a Bigfoot 1.2GB drive.
I always liked it because it was very quiet, and it was way larger than anyone else in my circle had at the time.
My first hard drive upgrade was adding a 40GB Seagate drive to my Pentium II machine running Windows 98, that originally came with a 5 GB WD Caviar. It didn't originally go well, as the BIOS was freezing at the hard drive detection stage. It turned out that the machine suffered from the 33.8 GB limit stemming from the number of cylinders being represented as a 16-bit value. Fortunately I manage to find a BIOS upgrade for my motherboard on some magazine cover CD and that solved the issue.
Without the appropriate update windows 98 can’t handle a partition that size without causing corruption
@AmazedStoner I think you're confusing it with the 128 GB limit that stems from 28-bit LBA addressing.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that I had two partitions on that drive at the time.
@ The format limit had nothing to do with it. Though that is actually much higher btw at around 2 terabytes if you use third party software or the command line to do it. The real problem was a known bug that would cause corruption when using scan disk without the appropriate patch.
@ all the smart people used two partitions to avoid wiping all data when reinstalling windows which was always inevitable.
I remember these being somewhat popular with the digital video editing crowd. I liked the concept. I remember one day being satisfied at understanding the drawback - higher seek latency from the head having to move further over the platter.
I had a 19.2 GB Bigfoot TS. It was huge for its time, and affordable. It only had a spindle speed of 4,000 rpm, while 3.5" drives did 5,400 rpm. 3.5" 7,200 rpm drives were also available, but they were expensive back then.
WDCTRL also required the BIOS to act as of one "cylinder" was reserved, or it wouldn't talk to it, and it expected ATA registers to reflect the last call to INT 13h. Because I remember what it took to get DOSBox-X IDE emulation to work with WDCTRL and Windows 3.1.
I'm afraid that my first Quantum Bigfoot experience was also my last. I bought one in the late 90s even though I had been told they were notoriously unreliable. I learnt first hand that its bad reputation was well earned. Mine broke down within weeks of purchase as it turned out that the controller board for it had a manufacturing error and an SMD component had fallen off (most likely due to a bad solder joint). It was quickly replaced with a Quantum Fireball of a similar size and I managed to transfer the data by replacing the controller board for the Bigfoot drive with one that was lying around at the computer store I worked at at the time.
3GB SCSI felt like a lot in 1996. In 2000 4 40gb drives in raid 0 acting as one 160gb drive also felt big, until it one drive failed 😂
I have a 1st gen bigfoot in my stash, I put it in a retro computer a decade ago for a while, I loved the loud sounds it was making. Must still be in a box somwhere in my basement lol.
I like the fact that part of BSOD message says "die Windows"
@@pvc988 german BSOD ^^
"Die Bart, Die!"
Been cleaning out old boxes today and found my FIL's Bigfoot from an IBM machine, P/N CY21A013, same revision. And now this in my YT feed. Really starting to think we are in a simulation...
@@acubley blue or red pill? ;)
Another great video
Thank you!
In 2020 when I upgraded my laptop from 1 512gb and 1 256gb SSD to 2 1TB SSDs. Previously it was a pretty smooth curve from 4 to 8 to 10 to 20 to 40 to 80 to 120 to 320 then 500gb drives. Of which my desktop in 2009 had 4. And it basically stayed like that with either regular hard drives or 240gb SSDs adding up to the same 2TB total capacity until 2020 when I got the 2x1TB drives and suddenly even my laptop could store as much data as my desktop it was so freeing.
My 286 Toshiba portable came with an 40M Conner HDD. When I first reinstalled dos, Win3.11, using Ontrack Disk Manager to wipe the HDD (yes, I got the parity virus), I find that the HDD was 80M but Toshiba recognized only two HDDs geometry: 20M and 40M. I installed the HDD with Ontrack and got access to all 80M. I felt that I never can fill the space, it was huge. I always used Ontrack driver to use 32bit Access for files and HDD in Win3.11, it was stable and compatible with all HDDs that I used, but I also find Micro House Fastdisk Driver to be very good as well.
Later, I had 120M HDD on my 486 and I got an IBM 520M, I felt the same, I can never fill that HDD. But I upgraded to Win95...
With Win98, I had an 4.2G HDD and upgraded to an 20G.
And so on...
Latest upgrade was from 2x2TB HDD + 1x240G SSD to 3x5TB HDDs + 1x750TB SSD on my actual computer. I am now at 30% space free...
Well, if there's one thing for certain then that you will *never* have enough disk space.
That 30 % free will be eaten up soon ;-)
I absolutely hate the Quantum Bigfoot drives with a passion. Everyone of them failed on me from the shortest time of five hours to the longest time of a month & a half of use (I personally bought three of them). From heads failing causing scratched platters to chips failing. I also had a lot of repair jobs from my customers that bought a system with those cursed drives. I started to treat Quantum as a unreliable company since.
From my collection of more than 30 vintage hard drives ranging from the first Seagate 10MB drive until the last IDE 320GB monsters the only drives that I have problems are of course Quantum drives.
When I found a new 1GB Quantum Bigfoot on clearance, it was mind-blowing to find anything for 10 cents per megabyte! But with such a large platter size and low rpm, the slow seek time and data rate were like, you want all those bootup icon files on your desktop today?
My first hard drive was a Quantum Fireball with 4 GB in size and had Windows XP on.
I had, and still have, a Compaq presario with a 386 and Windows 3.1 that currently has a 540MB hard drive. The first larger drive was my Eversham micros Windows 98 machine in 1998 that had first a 6.4GB drive then I installed a 12GB hard drive. I remember thinking that would be the largest drive I would ever need as I could never fill that. Now I have a machine with 18GB over multiple drives and I could easily use more.
Still got 4 of them big boys that are working good even after all those years. I loved those things when they were on the market. Yeah they were a bit slow but the price was good and they seemed reliable to me.
I first encountered one in a Compaq Presario from 1996. From what I understand, for a brief span of time it was more economical some how to use the 5 1/4 form factor for a hard drive. Not sure how that worked. The Big Foot was 2GB and was pretty slow. It was easy to upgrade to a more conventional and faster IDE drive
Perfect laptop hard drive. You connect it like a docking station.
I don't remember what brand or model ours was, but I remember my stepdad installing our first one-gigabyte hard drive in 1997 and saying "we'll *never* run out of space on this thing!" 😆
@@JoshColletta I‘m pretty certain many have said that over their lifetime ;)
The Quantum Fireball was my first >1GB disk and also the first total loss of data when it just died without warning.
I suppose I should say anything about "not taking backups", right? ;-)
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR well, that's the problem when your hdd is so large, that you can't backup everything. ;-)
1 GB was a crazy amount of space at that time.
@@intrinia Ah c'mon, it's only 694 floppy disks. I totally don't see the problem here :)
Spectacular :O
Yes when quantum decided to cheap out and use bigold platers instead of high-density 3.5" probably a QC work around...
I bought a Pentium PC in late 1994 which had a 540 MB hard drive. As I was always experimenting with stuff like Linux and OS/2 I quickly ran out of space and bought an 1 GB WD hard drive for around 800 DM, guess is must have been late 1995 or early 1996 which would fit with the price lists you showed. Also I remember I bought it at ESCOM which I think went bankrupt on 1996.
Not sure the capacity, but I have a Bigfoot sitting in a box in the house.
I worked at a computer store in the late 90's - early 2000's The BigFoot was a terrible drive. It was high capacity, but so slow. They had slower rpm's than competition; the larger disk meant higher seek times. There were other 5.25" drives on the market that had ~10 platters; these had like 1 or 2. This led to the lower MB/s. These were for people (and OEM's like Compaq) that just wanted to be able to say that they had a big drive. ZIP, JAZ, and tape drives were better for backups. Modern systems have lots of SATA ports, but IDE meant 2 (or maybe 4) drives / system back then. For most owners this was their only drive. Slow boot & application launch speeds. Just a terrible drive.
Great video
thank you
🙏
@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR thanks
Each time. First it was 1.7GB -> 6.4GB, then it was 40GB, 320GB and then at one point a 1TB. I think that the next WOW would be something like a 12TB.
But there are 12tb HDD, already..
And 8tb ssd.
WD Ultrastar even available in 32 TB capacities. How far have we come ^^
@ I meant for myself, since I don't have any of those.
I had one of these drives - it was... slow. But much bigger and actually affordable as a storage drive vs. just about anything else comparable. I seem to remember 5MB/Sec transfers on sequential reads, and much much worse for random I/O. Not a good boot drive at all, but as a second drive for photo or, um, Linux ISOs, it wasn't a bad deal. I would be surprised to find any of the original drives still functional today, as they were kind of cheaply made too. (Program note: It's PLAT-TERS, short A, for English pronunciation. I know English isn't your first language, so not a criticism, just a tutor point.)
My first PC in around 1995/6 had a 540mb HDD and ran Win 3.1 fine but now I'm confused. Why didn't I have this problem? Or did you say it was not a problem in 386 enhanced mode? Upgrading not just capacity but to a 7200rpm drive was a big deal to me around 2000. Also, having so many options in the BIOS that could literally make the difference between a PC booting and not, without any explanation as waht any of them actually meant, was clearly a design flaw of PCs in that era.
If I remember correctly, Win3.x did not enable by default 32Bit Disk Accesss and 32Bit File Access. You need to enter in the settings and enable them (see the screenshot in the video where it says 16-bit mode for both disk and file access).
Ah, I see.
I think that might be the "Megabytes" distortion, wether one speaks about Decimal Megabytes (MB) and Binary megabytes (MiB).
Hard drive vendors typically advertise capacity in decimal bytes for their drive capacity, so multiplying by 1000, instead of 1024.
So, a 540 (decimal) MB hard drive (540'000'000 bytes) would be 514'984'130 binary bytes, that's actually ~491 (binary) MiB.
Although it's a bit more complicated in the explanation (www.os2museum.com/wp/how-to-please-wdctrl/ explains it more in detail),
the Windows 3.1 FastDisk driver (aka 32-bit Disk Access, as Microsoft called it), was crashing on hard drives with > 1024 cylinders.
I simplified it by saying, it was over 512 MiB, but it's actually even over 504 MiB, to be fully correct. My bad.
Even so there was occasionally smaller capacity drives with >1024 cylinders, that was more often the case with the "bigger" drives above 504 MiB.
And the calculation goes as follows:
1024 cylinders * 16 Heads * 63 Sectors per Track * 512 Bytes per sector = 528’482’304 binary bytes, or 504 MiB.
So it is very likely, that your drive fell through, as it was below the magic boundary, hence not triggering the BSOD.
It is of course as well possible, that your drive was in fact 540 (binary) MiB.
But if you bought it like that, chance might be, the vendor had actually installed a patched driver as part of the factory install,
similar to the Micro House product I showed, to overcome the limitation.
Or ... 32-bit Disk Access was simply not enabled on your machine. Then now crash would arise, even with a bigger capacity hard drive.
@@sebastian19745 Correct, it's not enabled by default.
I wonder how much space a 5 1/4 drive could have today, with modern technology... Could be interesting.
Anyone remember having to use windows 95's disk compression which made your already slow disk access even slower?
@@3fives-j5w yes! Indeed!
Nice video but didnt you use 95 with that drive feels strange. I did i had 500mb with win3.11 :) have a Nice day ❤
i think i had the 4GB version of this that i used to run Windows 95 then later on 98 on a P200 with an odd amount of memory, i think 96MB RAM...
It was a MASSIVE drive, but not an issue :)
I have the 6.4GB model.
Why cant harddrives double in capacity each year these days.....
I was hoping to hear the drive until the very end of the video.
Ooops, spinning sound not included, sorry!
Check my video coming Sunday in a week on an old ESDI hard drive. It has some spinning sound! ;-)
i am looking for the 12gb model 5.25 bigfoot tx hdd
I misread that as 12TB. Imagine if they made a 5.25" footprint but used similar areal density to the current 20TB behemoths currently available?
@@SireSquish I IM LOOKING FOR THE 12GB 5.25 MODEL BIGFOOT TX HDD DO U HAVE ONE?