Correction: The pin header on the sound card is actually an output for playing the sound card's audio through your computer's internal speaker.

Taiwanese here, yes in the 1980s the Taiwanese government went all in to computer manufacturing, that was when the Hsinchu Science Industrial Park was established (I'm from Hsinchu), and companies like Acer and Asus today got started by manufacturing generic and reversed-engineered (aka pirated or unlicensed) computer components

@11:15 hard drives are not sealed (unless it is helium). Some will even have a arrow printed on the sticker "do not cover this hole". This is a breather hole, releasing pressure when the drive heats up. Also this is a reason hard drives have min/max altitude/pressure specifications. However the hole is small, and is protected by the filter on the inside.

0:56
"Here, you can see Windows XP booting up in its natural habitat..."

How those past 15 - 20 years went, from 4 - 8 GB HDDs before the turn of the Century to now 4 - 8 TB HDDs in 2017.  Guess storage capacities certainly are something that we'll find ourselves running out of sooner than one would have expected.

That "bonk" sound brought back memories of a friend's PC with a bad Bigfoot HDD. I knew your efforts were hopeless the moment I heard it.

Bloody lucky man, that is original IBM EGA, pretty rare card, worth in cca $100

As a wise Weed smoking, Taquito addict once said. "It's so big you gotta put in the front!"

I have the largest Bigfoot from the last series, the 20 Gig Bigfoot TS.  Faster RPM (if I remember right), and much better reliability (including a redesign to make it more resistant to shock damage).  I really do love those large drives and actually like the spindle sound and, more importantly, the stout seek sounds it makes.

I could hear it actually almost complete the seek test at 15:49. Perhaps some dust has settled on the platters, and it would clear up after running for a while?

I just run into a bigfoot on Lisbon’s flea market, it was under a bunch of optical drives, over the wet curb. Offered 1.5€ just for the kicks of it. It works flawlessly! I’m so happy to have this mythical creature in my retro collection! Cheers.

Small capacity hard drive production was probably maintained for service spares on old equipment. I recall seeing a 4gb 3.5" drive, dated 2004.  That 4gb drive was likely intended for service spares for 90s equipment.  On the other hand, I remember the 10gb capacity upgrade kits, circa 2000, complete with a floppy disk to re-flash an old computer's bios.

Drauga1 made a video about a Quantum Bigfoot HHD a while ago.

I remember taking many of those 5.25 inch drives apart for the circuit boards and metals when I was volunteering at MCC in the mid-2000s.  If I had foresight, I would have kept them and sent some your way today.  I can still identify metals by sight.

Whatever you do, DO NOT plug the PC Speaker signal into that sound card, you'll blow the amp. That header is an output for a speaker in the case, the PAS actually sniffs the PC Speaker signal directly from the ISA bus but might not detect it in faster machines. In short, you'd disconnect the PC Speaker from the motherboard and plug the speaker itself into the sound card. But yeah, otherwise the PAS cards are brilliant and they do have Sound Blaster compatibility. I swear by my PAS16 for my 66MHz Pentium system, never lets me down and their included software is brilliant.

I was explaining to my son how Drive lettering the other day.  I wanted to see if he knew why Hard Drives never get the letter A:\ or B:\. He suprised me the other day. I guess I have raised him well.

I remember years ago with a customer that had a bigfoot drive that was doing that and I fixed it with a firmware update.  A had to build a quantum bigfoot firmware disc and it flashed the drive and it was fine after that, however I think the drive was detecting in the bios.  I used to theorize that they called them Quantum because Quantum is related to time and it was only a matter of time before the drive died. Bigfoots and Fireball drives I learned to loathe.

I've got a Quantum Bigfoot TX 8Gb perfectly working with no bad sectors/read errors. But seeing this idk if that drive is going to die easily, for now i just keep it safe no using it.

Back when they were new, it was my experience that even the earliest Bigfoot drives were head and shoulders above the 3.5" Fireball line in terms of reliability. And yet somehow things have turned around. I've still got a few Fireball drives that work and no (well, maybe there is *one*) Bigfoot drives that still work.

I was able as of a few weeks ago to post a comment on Youtube using IE8.

We had those big foots in our school PC's in the 90s.