As a matter of interest, I thought I'd post a couple of images of drives we found in our junkbox...

Some of you will remember that I've said that Quantum Fireball's were well named:

This is an old 10.2GB drive - been lying around the workshop since it died. It was labelled
as a dead device in March 2003 when we went through our "Phoenix Box" which we use
to hold drives that have a good chamber but failed logic board or vice versa.
We have had occasion to successfully recover data from good chambers by swapping
matching logic boards from drives with bad chambers. Gotta get an exact match.

Note the smoke residue on the chip below and in line with the crack in the one that blew.
Scorch marks in drive bays were common.
We actually saw one go once - really "brightened up" our day


This is an old 4.3GB drive.

Different drive, same chip. This is the least damaged of all the Fireballs I've seen.

There doesn't seem to be any manufacture dates on either drive but usually they would fail within 2 years, and often within 1 year

This kind of damage was common in Fireballs from around 2GB and up. Might explain my
antipathy towards Quantum hard drives.

--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya laugh --=--
You're only paranoid if you're wrong!