Drives of 1997
This was the period when the Pentium 166 and the 6x86 200 were everywhere, when even the most conservative system buyers were starting to order Windows 95 rather than DOS and Windows 3.1, when 32MB of RAM was a lot, when sharp, clear 15 inch monitors became standard fare for new system buyers, and when 2.1GB and 3.2GB hard drives were the stand-out best choice on price-performance grounds.
For us, it was an IBM year. We used IBM hard drives in about two-thirds of our systems, and IBM or IBM-manufactured processors in an even higher proportion of them.
(As always in the individual entries, the stars beside a drive indicate the volume it sold in. No stars means we didn't sell them new, one star, that we sold a mere handful, perhaps three or four individual ones or one batch of half a dozen. Four stars indicate a really popular drive; five stars, one of our all-time best sellers.)
