Photo: Red Hill.
Quantum Bigfoot TX
The Bigfoot TX replaced the Bigfoot CY and maintained the Bigfoot tradition. It was quite cheap, available in some remarkably large sizes (Wikipedia claims that the TX was the first IDE drive over 10GB, which I don't remember, but nobody paid much attention to new Bigfoot releases and it sounds about right), moderately reliable, common only in low-quality mass-market machines from the usual consumer junk-box makers, and horribly slow.
The TX introduced a slightly faster 4000 RPM spin rate, and this together with a significant increase in areal density produced an excellent data transfer rate, but DTR on its own is rarely terribly useful, and never provides that sense of instant compliance which comes with a bit of RAM and a fast access time.
As with all the Bigfoot drives, we never sold the TX new, and were a bit reluctant to use them even as trade-ins because of their poor performance, but often saw them in the workshop when third-party machines came in for upgrade.
Illustration: a Bigfoot TX 8.0 with, for scale, a 2.5 inch laptop drive, on a variety of Quantum 3.5 inch drives.
| Performance | 0.97 | Reliability | no data |
| Data rate | 142 Mbit/sec | Spin rate | 4000 RPM |
| Seek time | 12ms | Buffer | 128k |
| Platter capacity | 4GB | Encoding | PRML |
| Form | 5¼ quarter or third height | Interface | ATA-33 |
| TX 4.0 | 4GB | 2 MR heads | |
| TX 6.0 | 6GB | 3 MR heads | |
| TX 8.0 | 8GB | 4 MR heads | |
| TX 12.0 | 12GB | 6 MR heads |