I bought bad Quantum drives, will any of them work? 

The drives with broken heads were sold as untested though, not as bad (I wouldn’t complain if drives sold as bad are actually bad) they also weren’t 5€ for 5 drives. It just was annoying to get two drives with broken top head back to back (I got that lot with those Quantums before the two drives with broken heads as well)

Yep, I bought these thinking I’d show the insides of 4 (and then 5 when the seller said they added an extra one) quantum drives, but I didn’t expect I’d get 4 of them to actually boot.

Yeah the sound Quantum drives make when spinning down is interesting, and it isn’t surprising the 740x does that too since it is based on Quantum’s design.

if the drive has trouble reading, the PCB spins the drive up faster to try to release the headlock because it thinks the headstack is stuck in park. Every quantum drive does this.

It’s a common thing with Quantums and there’s actually nothing wrong with the motor speed, when the drive has trouble reading it spins the platters faster for some reason, probably because of the air lock system to make sure the heads aren’t stuck due to it. It’s pretty crazy that two of the drives recovered after I messed with them. But that’s why I mess with the dead drives, most of the time it’ll do nothing and they’ll stay dead, but what if?

I bought them listed as bad, so of course it would be expected that they are pretty rough. It's hard to tell if drives are prone to failure or not, especially when they are 20+ years old. How they were handled and stored probably matters quite a bit, but it's impossible to know if the people that had drives before you buy them took good care of them or not.

@@arnlol Yeah that's fair, I'm just curious since I have a ~3gb capacity one (can't remember the model) and it's going strong to this day without issues.

@@KJ7BZC well if it’s been working fine and hasn’t been handled or anything, I don’t see any reason why not to trust it, now of course hard drives are mechanical devices and can fail at any point regardless. Having a backup to restore from is always a good idea just in case. (I haven’t followed this on my old computers and have lost some stuff and had to start from scratch, not even because a drive failed but from my own mistakes like formatting the wrong drive etc)

What do you mean, about dust? My room is very far from free of dust but older drives like this do not care as much and have a filter that should catch that as well, but you know when they are dead, what’s the worst that can happen? I do not open drives when they are fully functional.

@@arnlol The dust could accumulate on platters. I actually didn't know about the dust filter before. Thanks for the information

Most modern drives use parking ramps but as far as I know Seagate still makes some drives contact start/stop, maybe that’s the case with these. It’s pretty crazy to have modern drives suffering from stiction…

I have had drives recover after a few restarts multiple times before but these seemed like they wouldn’t, until I messed with them and suddenly they worked. It doesn’t really makes sense but I won’t complain. For the Daytona, I removed the magnet and the rubber stop was there easy to remove as well. I cleaned all the rubber off and put two layers of shrink wrap in its place, that worked great. Now it might be possible for some of them to have the rubber under the platters I guess, at which point I’m not sure if improvising a stop would be possible on these or not.

I have opened a Fireball TM before (of both design) and they didn’t use rubber in them, I’m pretty sure they stopped using rubber on the original Fireballs and newer. I don’t know what’s wrong with your drive, maybe you can try to clean the connection between the headstack and PCB, but it probably won’t matter. I think these have a fairly quiet click of death so it might just be done :(

@@arnlol Thanks for the answer! I already tried reflowing the solder on both ribbon cable and 4 motor pins - it didn't change anything, unfortunately. Also nothing look wrong on PCB and nothing is heating up excessively. Was hoping it just got stuck (because of the rubber issue or similar), but looks like it's not the case if they weren't using rubbers on Fireballs. Feels like it's trying to read something off the platters, but fails. What's interesting is that first time LED blinks 7 times and then it's blinking 8 times until I power it off. I found error codes description for quantum drives which says 7 - Data field sync timeout, 8 - Recovered data field sync timeout. 78 - Recovrd RCL FLT - Can't seek to OD near Sys Cyl. But I'm out of ideas what else to try... Anyway, maybe someone just dropped it and its head went straight to IC heaven. Once again, thanks for the great videos that bring up good memories!

@@arnlol Ended up opening the drive. One head was torn off and ended up on the magnet, so I guess this behavior and error mean "a head is missing".

@@aspinx in one of the more recent lots, I also got a TM that had a ripped off head… Stiction sure is annoying…

Yeah I assume they shoved a screwdriver in the one they tried to open because they didn’t know there was a screw on the center of the spindle. I did let the heads of the ST and SE touch, as I’ve said before people say letting the heads touch kill them but in my experience that is simply not true at least on older drives (on newer drives they became smaller and very fragile, at that point yeah they probably die if they touch) I spaced them apart using a flat screwdriver in between the two thin metal parts at the end of the arm that they are attached to, they weren’t really stuck together they were easily separated. For the Daytona I removed the top magnet and the bumper is on a piece of metal that could be removed then. I cleaned all the rubber and put two layers of shrink wrap in its place, which did the job.

@@arnlol I'm surprised to hear that you let the heads touch and used a flathead screwdriver to separate them, wow. Last time I did that I broke one of the heads off so not sure if a smaller or larger flathead is better to use. Also when removing the magnet on the Daytona, how did the actuator not want to move off the platters? I had that happen with a ProDrive before and I have seen it happen to other people as well since the magnet takes a lot of force to remove and then usually the actuator will want to come off the platters. Thanks for the explanation, maybe you should do a hard drive repair series or video showing how to repair the drives properly haha. Wonder where you got the shrink wrap from, I have never used that and I would use hot glue which is probably a terrible idea. I need your magic over here : ))

@@cdos9186 if the heads get really stuck together I guess you’d be very likely to break them, luckily every time I’ve let heads touch they weren’t hard to separate again, but I might just have been lucky so far. Yes you need to be very careful with the Daytona as you remove the stop that prevents the heads from getting off of the platters. I think I noticed the heads moving then held the arm with my finger while carefully removing the magnet so that they wouldn’t come off the platters.

@@arnlol Thanks for the advice. I hope I get a Daytona eventually, they are really awesome drives and are sadly becoming harder and harder to find the failure rates with them seem to be through the roof and most people are just throwing them out when they go bad and replacing them with CF cards and such which is unfortunate. I had heads get stuck before and actually bend out of place, the actual flexible piece of metal used to hold them, and once they get bent they will never go back to where they want to spring back into place. It is a very delicate operation and is so hard to work with the tiny parts inside without messing up something small that would result in the drive not working again.

They aren’t, they are 2 platters, 3 heads drives, the top surface is not used and thus doesn’t have a head on there. The other surfaces have normal looking heads. That’s how they made intermediate capacity drives, not using a side from one of the platters. Drives with 3 platters and 5 heads, as well as 4 platters and 7 heads also existed. Some lower end cheaper drives also exist with only a single head.

The top surface in the Quantum isn’t being used, which is why it looks like that, so if you removed a head I assume that yes it would look similar, though obviously the arm probably doesn’t look like the same. I hope that drive was dead though, obviously it will never work again without its heads

@@arnlol yeah i was curious about the fact that my laptop was very repairable, and i looked at the hard drive and just put it back in, then the hard drive stopped spinning up so ye, its dead

Yep! I guess the two drives with broken heads I got after these were a way to tell me I can’t get this lucky every time x)

I do not have any duplicate SCSI drives aside from a 40GB 10k rpm one which would be way too new and run too hot. I don’t have that many SCSI drives to begin with and many of the smaller ones have issues. If that machine had a early Quantum which is dead, it might be possible to fix it if it’s impacted by the rubber issue, though that requires opening the drive to do so.

Thanks for the heads up, but I already attempted the drive repair of the rubber feet... it turns out the there was some sort of problem before that as there was a deep scratch in the drive.@@arnlol

@@DB4KK Ah yeah that’s not good… Unless you really want the same drive as the original one, it’s probably better to avoid the early Quantum ones unless you are fine with attempting to fix them, as if they haven’t failed to the rubber issue yet, they will eventually… Which sucks because they are decent drives otherwise.

I don't mind doing any repair, I think that I could definitely do it. And yes, those quantum drives were pretty good back in the day, things just don't seem to last 20-30 years unless you get really lucky.@@arnlol

The laptop I used for it is a 450MHz AMD CPU with 256 MB of RAM, so it’s a lot faster than the Pentium 133 with 24 MB :) I ran 95 on the Daytona as it has bad sectors that causes the drive to stop responding and getting 98 on it was too much trouble.

I don’t know, I feel like it wasn’t that long ago but I guess it actually is close to a year… I think I’ll wait until I get past 300 drives at least (and Im pretty close to that, if not already past it. I have a file with a list of my drives but some of the most recent ones I got I didn’t put them in yet)

I see@@arnlol

I don’t know but I won’t complain x)

might be a small thing in one of the headstack that caused the drive to suddenly start working

Were they? I guess everyone had their experiences but Quantum certainly was one of the major manufacturers at the time, so they must have been at least somewhat decent. Some of them have not stood the test of time though, especially the older ones with bad rubber stoppers in them.