While I am fond of Quantum hard drives, unfortunately, this was amongst the last of them that I ever handled as it was sold to Maxtor in the same year.
The Drive
Like other Quantum drives, it retains a simple flat top lid with Philips screws to secure it. Label positioning and material finish have changed subtly, however.
In this case, the cast bottom tub is in a black finish with parts of the PCB covered by a self-adhesive piece of black plastic, possibly to reduce the chances for damage to the heads and preamp components.
The serial number label is now on the front edge of the drive, while the drive model information is no longer on the IDE connector assembly.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
The drive supports SMART, reporting a firmware of A1Y.1300 and a cache buffer size of 1902kB. It has only seen a very modest amount of use and appears to report healthy vital signs.
HD Tune
Testing of the drive seems to support this assertion, as the drive seemed to function properly, recording an average throughput of about 29.5MB/s and some very good access times.
This seems to be aided by the buffer, which seems to work effectively both on reads and writes. Some long I/O delays were encountered with writing, however.
CrystalDiskMark
As usual, the CDM result mostly concurs with the HD Tune result.
ATTO
Full read performance seems to be reached by 4kB, although is very strong even down to 1kB, whereas writes need 16kB accesses or above to reach the full potential.