Quantum hard drives

Quantum was one of several hard drive manufacturers who thrived in the shadow of Seagate and Western Digital in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. On March 31, 2001, Quantum merged with Maxtor, another smaller, independent drive manufacturer. The $1.3 billion acquisition made Maxtor larger than Seagate, however briefly. But the expected $6 billion in annual revenue for the combined company never panned out.

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.

Building a short-lived giant

The $1.3 billion acquisition of Quantum’s hard drive business made Maxtor larger than Seagate, however briefly. But the expected $6 billion in annual revenue for the combined company never panned out.

Maxtor drives didn’t have the best reputation, although I never had any trouble with them and neither did any of my friends who had them. I think the fear was that a Quantum-Maxtor tieup would be more like Maxtor than Quantum. In my experience the reverse was true, but to some people, Seagate seemed like a safer bet, which could explain why Seagate quickly re-emerged as the largest drive manufacturer.

Quantum also had a booming business as a major manufacturer of tape drives. Quantum retained that business and continues selling tape drives nearly a quarter century later.

Why are Quantum hard drives 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.

I have a friend who has opened vintage hard drives and done repairs without a cleanroom, and he’s gotten away with it, but it’s risky. You have to be very careful not to let any dust get onto the platters. But if you can do that, replacing the degraded rubber parts in a Quantum drive usually gets it running again.

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. I asked the IBM field techs if I was imagining things. They said no, that IBM experienced very low RMA rates on Quantum 3.5-inch drives.

In my experience at least, 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 using SpinRite or a similar tool before the drive failed completely.

In some cases, the drive never failed, it just kept running with a few bad sectors.

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 than 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.

As for Quantum, the company still exists. They only sold the hard drive business to Maxtor, keeping their tape drive business. Quantum survives as a maker of tape drives today.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.