Photo: Red Hill.
Quantum Fireball Plus KA
Oddly enough, Quantum was the last of the major makers to produce a 7200 RPM IDE drive.
Though Quantum took a long time getting to 7200 RPM, when the Firebal Plus finally arrived in mid-1999 it proved well worth the wait: by a narrow margin from the Expert/GXP twins, it was the the fastest IDE drive of all.
Here at Red Hill we sold the Western Digital Expert and, a little later, Seagate's Barracuda ATA so we had no requirement for the Fireball Plus and never sold it as a new drive, but in the wider market, Quantum had a good deal of success with this model.
(Surely Quantum's marketing department could have thought of a better name than "Fireball Plus" though — Quantum used to be pretty good at this sort of thing once.)
⇒ The Fireball Plus AS illustrated was a later model, but looks similar.
| Performance | 1.33 | Reliability | no data |
| Data rate | 235 Mbit/sec | Spin rate | 7200 RPM |
| Seek time | 8.5ms | Buffer | 512k |
| Platter capacity | 6.1GB | Interface | ATA-66 |
| KA 6.1 | 6.1GB | 3 MR heads | |
| KA 9.4 | 9.4GB | 4 MR heads | |
| KA 13.2 | 13.2GB | 6 MR heads | |
| KA 18.2 | 18.2GB | 8 MR heads |