[geeks] Anyone familiar with old Medea VideoRAID hardware?

[nate at portents.com]

Picked up a couple of Medea VideoRAID SCSI 2/80 drives at the MIT Swapfest
recently, never encountered them before.  I was wondering if anyone had
any experience with them, and changing the drives in them... they're about
7 years old.  Avid bought out Medea a few years ago, so there is no Medea
website, but I found a few bits of info on Avid's site, like this:

http://avidtechnology.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/avidtechnology.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=73316

Opening up each enclosure, Medea used two 40GB PATA disks, and has their
own proprietary RAID controller built around an Altera Programmable Logic
Device that presents the drives as a single SCSI volume to the host. 
Apparently they do hardware RAID in a form they called "Zone Striping
Technology" which I've seen vaguely described as reading from the inside
tracks of one drive while reading from the outside tracks of the other in
order to deliver consistent data throughput across the entire RAID volume.

Anyway, the 40GB (WD400) drives in the enclosures work, but the bearings
are worn and they are noisy (that sort of metal grinding sound old non-FDB
drives make when they age), and I've tried but been unable to come up with
any solid information on swapping in other pairs of drives... seems Medea
liked to sell and support the enclosures as a single system and encourage
owners to trade up to newer Medea/Avid hardware.

Any with any info or tips would be appreciated, thanks!

- Nate