The Bigfoot hard drive was a brand of hard disk marketed by Quantum Corporation in the mid-1990s which featured a larger physical size than hard disks typical at the time. Typical hard drives are 3.5" in diameter, while Bigfoot hard drives were 5.25" wide and fit in a standard IBM PC drive bay. The main rationale behind the design change was that the typical PC user already owns cases that made provision for a 5.25" drive, and by using lower data densities and a larger physical size, Quantum was able to deliver the products at lower prices, thus more competitively. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... Quantum Corporation is a manufacturer of tape drive products, based in San Jose, California. ... An inch (plural: inches; symbol or abbreviation: in or, sometimes, ″ - a double prime) is the name of a unit of length in a number of different systems, including English units, Imperial units, and United States customary units. ... IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... Full-height, 2 half-height, and 3. ... Apple Macintoshes like the iMac Core Duo are personal computers. ...

Bigfoot drives initially a success, earning inclusion in low-end stock PCs such as ones manufactured by Compaq as well as being popular with the PC enthusiast community. However, Quantum replaced the Bigfoot product line with the Fireball product line sometime in the late 1990s. Compaq Computer Corporation is an American personal computer company founded in 1982, and now a brand name of Hewlett-Packard. ... Look up fireball in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Larger disk drives tend to have higher costs in materials and have slower access times and increased noise levels, due to the larger distances the magnetic head must travel before being able to access the data stored on the platter. These may have been the reasons for Quantum's move away from the Bigfoot drives. A hard disk platter is a component of a hard disk drive, which may have one or more hard disk platters. ...

Bigfoot drives were produced in capacities of 1.28GB, 1.6GB, 2.1GB, 2.5GB, (single platter) 4.3GB, 6.8GB, 8.0GB, 13.0GB, 19.2GB(double platter) and were produced by a variety of different plants in Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and other locations. The interface with the computer was an ATA-3 Advanced Technology Attachment interface. Bigfoot drives were amongst the first to support Logical Block Addressing (LBA) and Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) monitoring. ATA cables: 40 wire ribbon cable top, 80 wire ribbon cable bottom Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) is a standard interface for connecting storage devices such as hard disks and CD-ROM drives inside personal computers. ... Logical block addressing in computing maps conceptual data storage onto secondary storage. ... Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T., is a monitoring system for computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. ...