List of 2.5" Laptop SCSI Hard Drives
Below is a list of known manufacturers of 2.5" SCSI hard drives, along with some info on their reliability and problems.
Conner Peripherals
Conner Peripherals was one of the three 2.5" SCSI drive manufacturers that were used as OEM factory drives in Apple PowerBooks. If you have a PowerBook 100, 140, or 170 that hasn't had the drive replaced, you're pretty much guranteed to have a Conner in there. They continued to produce drives through around 1994.
Early Style
Early style Conner drives have a design that looks like this:
These drives have a rubber bumper inside the head assembly that turns sticky, causing the heads to stick. Nearly none of these will work without this addressed. A Conner in this state will spin up (while sounding a bit "off"), won't move the heads, and then (I think) spin down again, rinse and repeat.
If there are no other problems with the drive, you can just stick a piece of tape over the bumper and the drive will work again.
Later Style
Later style Conner drives have a design that looks like this:
These don't have the rubber bumper, so if you have a dead one, it's probably just dead.
Fujitsu
Fujitsu 2.5" SCSI drives are extremely rare as they weren't used as Apple OEM drives. Below is a photo of one example from oldcrap.org
IBM
IBM SCSI drives were used as OEM drives in PowerBooks. Of the three brands Apple used, IBMs are the most reliable. One problem common to these drives is when they simply won't spin up. On the one drive I've found with this issue, the cause was a blown fuse on the drive PCB. I don't know if that's always the cause, or why the fuses blow.
Quantum
Quantum SCSI drives were used as OEM drives in PowerBooks. These are generally the most unreliable of the brands Apple used. All Quantum SCSI drives have rubber bumpers inside of them that cause the heads to get stuck. Affected drives will spin up, then make a repetitive noise as they try and fail to unpark the heads.
Two generations of the Quantum SCSI drives exist - GoDrives and Daytonas (which also have GoDrive printed on them). The original GoDrives have a bumper under the platters. On these drives, the only possible way to get one to work would be to design a shim of some kind that prevents the heads from contacting this bumper. The second generation GoDrive Daytonas only have bumpers in the head assembly and can be repaired. There is nothing preventing the heads from leaving the platters while the top cover of the magnet is off, so be very careful when doing this.
Even putting aside the bumpers, Quantum drives have a poor reputation for reliability. Bad sectors seem to be very common.
Toshiba
Toshiba 2.5" SCSI drives were not used by Apple as an OEM drive, but they seem to be more common than the Fujitsus as third-party/aftermarket upgrades. Unlike later Toshiba drives, these do not have rubber bumpers inside of them and are generally decently reliable. One note is that they do have a rather loud parking break (makes the platters stop spinning faster). A loud noise during spindown, especially if power is suddenly cut, is normal.
Page last updated (MM/DD/YYYY): 09/30/2024
Update Reason: page created
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