Old Disc Drives - Modern IDE Hard Disk Drives

Synopsis

Modern IDE drives all come with voice coils and increased capacities from a few hundred megabytes to a couple of hundred gigabytes. These are mostly boring black boxes that are just doing their job. And they do it very well.

Quantum Fireball EX 4.3AT

In my opinion, this is one the best Fireball series disk drive. I became attached to Quantum disk drives somewhere back in 1995 when I first had the beautiful Quantum ProDrive LP-52s 50 Mb SCSI drive. Then, back in 1998 or so, I had my first 2.5 Gb Quantum Fireball drive. It was instant love. I can name only two other drives that I had the same feelings for: the Seagate ST-351A/X and the Western Digital Red 2 Tb. For me the 2.5 Gb Fireball disk was a gigantic step forward from the old 340 Mb Western Digital 2340 drive I previously had back then. I began having space for all my programs without having to periodically delete games and software that I wasn't using.

It was that drive started my passion for the Fireball series. Unfortunately I don't remember what I did with it after it became obsolete. Some time ago in 2012, I wanted to reiterate my memories so I went ahead and bought this 4.3 Gb Fireball EX. The original one I had was an EL series.

This drive has 2 platters and 3 heads! Interesting enough. This makes me think that capacity per platter is 2.86 Gb.

When you hold one of these in your hand, it just screams: quality. This is one of my all time favorite disk drives. If I'll have the chance I will collect more of them.

TECHNICAL DATA

CAPACITY: 4.31 Gb
ACTUATOR TYPE: VOICE COIL
DISCS: 2
MEDIA TYPE: THIN FILM
RECORDING METHOD: ?
SPINDLE SPEED: 5.400 rpm
INTERFACE: ATA-3 (IDE mode 4)
AVERAGE ACCESS: 10 ms

Thank you for spending your time reading these old pages.