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Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I hear mention of Connor and Connor Peripherals Inc. I get the shivers. Not this has much to do with Apple's hidden recovery partition other than Connor drives are mentioned here.

Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor Peripherals Inc. I've had them fail on many occasions—they'd fail if so much as to look at them.

I recall one instance where I'd spent hours setting up my computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was the OS chucked an 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' message. Drive was completely dead.

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Same here. Thirty years later, I'm still reeling from the loss of an inestimable trove of software created between the late Seventies and the early Nineties (many now-defunct operating systems, extremely rare programs and so on). All that on a 800MB Conner drive, which I had installed as a secondary (non-boot) drive in my system. The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs, something that was unusual even for that period of time - it simply disappeared from the OS/BIOS, less that a year after I bought it.

"The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs,…"

Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's essentially what happened to the others—about a dozen or so. They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.) BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape streamers for backups.

Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB. If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was only 40MB.

Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by way of a data recovery service or such?

Do you still have the drive? You might be able to recover the content. The level of difficulty might be anything from "plug it into an adapter and make an image with dd" to "find a working drive of the same type and start swapping parts other than the platters" though.

No, I don't have it anymore. I kept it around for 3 or 4 years, trying various methods to revive it, then threw it away when I took a job in New Zealand, hoping to move there for good. Well, that didn't work out and I came back after a few years, but the drive (and many other things) were lost in the process.

Also: the drive was absolutely dead, it wouldn't power up. I even tried to change its controller - I took it off another Conner drive, installed it on the deceased one - and nothing happened. On that occasion I realized that, even though they were the same model/capacity, Conner had used different electronics for different batches.

Ironically, the drive was built like a tank: never again I saw a hard-drive with a casing that thick (looked like cast iron).

Conner. With an E.

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Conner_Peripherals

You might be thinking of Terminator ...?

Yeah, thanks. I ought to know by now. It's a double problem, the editor corrects to 'or' and my work colleague is also a 'Connor'.

Right, perhaps the name ought to be Data Terminator. :-)

I remember another brand, JTS, from the 90's. While Connor was bad, JTS was the undisputed king of data loss. They didn't last long as a company.

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