Last Updated on March 31, 2024 by Dave Farquhar
I made no secret about my high regard for Quantum hard drives back when they were new. But Quantum hard drives are notorious in the retro community today. I think I can explain what’s going on.
Why Quantum hard drives are unreliable today?
When a Quantum hard drive fails today, opening it up quickly shows what went wrong. Almost invariably, the problem is one of the rubber parts inside the drive degraded with age. The part became sticky and not only stopped doing its job, but fouled up some other mechanical component and made it unable to do its job as well. And this problem goes all the way back to the 1980s Plus Hardcards made by Quantum for the original IBM PC and clones. The older the drive, the less likely it works today.
A similar problem frequently occurs on old CD-ROM drives. The rubber belt inside the drive degrades and the drive sticks shut. The major difference being that you can safely open up a CD-ROM drive, pull out the degraded parts, clean it up, and replace the belts without needing access to a cleanroom.
Quantum hard drives then versus now
Between 1995 and 2009, I did a great deal of hardware maintenance. For some of those years, that included RMAing faulty or failed components, or specifying compatible replacements for the procurement department if the failed component was out of warranty.
It didn’t take me long to notice we had huge quantities of Quantum hard drives at my first job, and I rarely saw a failed Quantum drive, at least when it came to the 3.5-inch variety. The 5.25-inch Quantum Bigfoot drives weren’t as good.
But when it came to the 3.5-inch drives, they were excellent from a reliability perspective. They failed less frequently than any of the other major brands on the market at the time. And when they did fail, they typically didn’t fail in a catastrophic manner. Typically, the drive would start acting up. A surface scan would reveal the drive had bad sectors, but as long as we caught the problem soon after the drive started acting funny, we had at least a couple of days to back up the data on the drive and attempt recovery on the damaged portions of the drive before the drive failed completely.
Consistency
At the time, Quantum drives were good, but more importantly, they were consistent. With every other brand of drive, I noticed they would go through hot and cold streaks. Very few of them were consistently bad, that’s why they lasted several generations. The ones that were consistently bad quickly exited the market.
So when you find an old computer that’s been stored away for a couple of decades, assuming it’s not in pieces, it probably still worked when it went into storage. Whoever owned it probably got a new computer, moved whatever data they could to their new computer, and then stored the old computer just in case they forgot anything. And in those situations, time was probably less kind to Quantum than to any other brand of drive. That doesn’t mean every Quantum drive fails when you try to wake it up today, but a higher percentage of them fail then other brands.
But it was also my experience that a higher percentage of Quantum drives survived to old age and therefore were in a position to get stored away while still working.
That gives the impression that Quantum drives weren’t very reliable. And if I were going to use a conventional hard drive in a vintage PC today, I would go for a brand other than Quantum. But in the 90s, I never regretted buying a Quantum, and I can’t say the same for any other brand.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.