TP760CD, Quantum Europa 1080 - it works!

[<paulwal@colum.mindspring.com>]

Well, I promised to report on my project to use a Quantum
disk drive in my 760CD....

Executive Summary: It works!

Details:

I bought the Quantum Europa 1080 from GDS
(www.westworld.com/~gds/) for $198, including shipping,
with the assurance that it would work in my ThinkPad.
Conversation:

  Me: Will this work in my IBM ThinkPad 760CD?
  GDS: Yeah, no problem.
  Me: What kind of connector does it have?
  GDS: The person that knows all about ThinkPads is
       busy right now. If it doesn't work you can
       send it back.
  Me: OK.

By the time I received the drive, I had learned a little
about caddys, and of course the drive came with the standard
44-pin ATA Bus Connector. By looking through the mailing
list archives I found mention of the ThinkPad internal HD
mounting kit made by DataStor. They have a web site at
www.dstor.com, but the information is sketchy.

I ordered the kit from Internet Shopping Network through
their web site www.isn.com. It was $65, including shipping.
Part number ITR210X.

The kit consists of a "U"-shaped aluminum frame with
mounting holes in the sides. When installed in the ThinkPad,
the bottom of the frame is open ("U" is down). The
high-density connector is mounted on two ears and has a wire
loop attached as a handle.  There is a short (~ 1 inch)
piece of flexible conductor attached between the
high-density connector and a 50-pin connector. The flexible
conductor has a crease in it so that when the drive is
installed the conductor is folded double between the end of
the drive and the high-density connector.  The kit also
includes 4 short mounting screws and an instruction sheet.

The drive fits perfectly in the frame, the side mounting
holes match up, and the screws fit the threads in the drive.
The thickness of the entire assembly is a smidge over 19mm.
When installed in the 760CD it takes a little more force to
engage the right-hand keyboard latch than the left-hand
latch.  The mounting screws stick out a little from the
sides of the bracket, but the assembly fits fine in the
ThinkPad. It's about 3mm shorter than the IBM drive.

Paranoia points:

pp1. The inside of the mounting bracket is bare aluminum. When
     mounted, the drive's circuit board is not touching the
     bracket, but it's mighty close. I can slide a sheet of
     paper between them. The aluminum is thin, and could
     easily be dented.
pp2. The data sheet with the drive shows that the ATA bus
     is 44 pins (2x22), a 1-pin gap, and 4 pins (2x2) for
     "factory test points". It states that "Factory test
     points should remain open after installing the 44-pin
     connector". The connector in the mounting bracket is
     50 pins, and covers all the pins. It appears that there
     are conductors from the "test point" pins to the
     high-density connector. Hmmmmmm.
pp3. The end of the bracket opposite the connectors is open,
     and about 1mm of the drive, and circuit board, sticks out.
pp4. When installed in the ThinkPad, the drive is upside-down.
     (does it matter?).

The Quantum drive has a jumper on the side to set master
(DS), slave (SP), or cable select (CS). A footnote states
that if CS is jumpered, then the drive will be a master if
pin 28 is grounded, and a slave if it's open. I left the
jumper on DS, for master. The jumper is covered by the
mounting bracket, so it's non-trivial to change it.

Despite the paranoia points noted above, I replaced the
1.2GB drive with this one, turned it on, and booted MSDOS
from diskette. I used FDISK to create one primary partition
of maximum size. I formatted it as a FAT drive, and CHKDSK
showed total space of about 1085MB with 32K clusters. I ran
Norton Disk Doctor to do surface analysis and got no errors.
The BIOS reports the drive as 60 heads, 589 cylinders, with
60 sectors per track.

Miscellaneous statistics:

                            IBM           Quantum
                            1.2GB         Europa 1080

FDISK size                 1158 MB         1035 MB

CHKDSK size                                1085 MB

Norton SI V8:
  Average seek             10.88 ms        13.85 ms
  Data xfer rate           1561 KBps       1503 KBps

So, I guess I'll start installing software.

Things I didn't try:

Cable select - will pin 28 correctly select master/slave in
the TP760CD when the drive is moved to the UltraBay with the
HD adapter?

Paul Walukewicz
paulwal@colum.mindspring.com