No it's not a Yetti, it's a Bigfoot...

These are all photos of a piece of computing history. The Quantum Bigfoot. The name presumably taken from the disk drive's large 5.25 inch form factor. It was no secret that these drives were a poor performer -because of the lage disk diameter (as opposed to the conventional 3.5in form factor) of the platter... Thats the shiny round bit you can see in the photos.
The Big Foot is not held in very high regard, but despite this general bad publicity, it has proven to be quite a reliable drive. There were actually quite a lot of them made in the mid to late 90's with the last of them being the TS Series in 99'. This one pictured here is a 2.1Gb model... Absolute gold I say. It even had a clear portal on the front of the disk casing where you could see the head whizzing around during seek operations. Very exciting, very sexy. This feature by the way is making a comeback from what I hear of late by Western Digital -Another leading brand of Hard Disk Manufacturers that was around when Quantum were making these little gems.


To my memory, I could not recall ever seeing a 5.25 inch drive quite like the big foot. They were very slow performers and awkward looking drives, but slimline in thickness by comparison to their overall dimensions. They were a chunky feeling drive with quite a lot of weight to them. While most people hated them, they apparently cost less to buy and so found quite a popular market. Bigfoot drives ceased production around the time that I started in my current job, so I never had to install one, but had several encounters with systems that possesed the sexy little buggers. Some companies like HP shipped them in their premium Pentium Pro based systems as well, which was a questionable move, given their poor seek times (the time it took to access info on the platter). It seems as though there is a popular belief that the drives were notoriously unreliable. This is larely unsubstantiated as these drives can still be found alive and well in captivity and definately deserve a mention in the I.T record books as being a drive that dared to be different. I think that Quantum was later swallowed up by Maxtor in the early part of this century. Maxtor are now one of the worlds leading Hard Disk Drive Manufacturers. Interesting huh? Quantum did what I say is an admirable thing... They dared to be different. We could all take a leaf from the Quantum book I reckon. Even if they were swallowed up by a bigger fish.