[rescue] rescue Digest, Vol 64, Issue 27

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
>> Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>>> I'm willing to bet that the drive that failed was one of the 
>>> Maxtor-rebadged Quantum Fireball drives just after Maxtor bought 
>>> them up.
>>
>> I believe Maxtor bought Quantum for it's Atlas line of enterprise SCSI
>> drives IMHO.... but I don't really know of course (could have been 
>> for patents, etc).
>
> Atlas were damned fine drives.  One of the best drives I ever had, for 
> its time, was a full-height 5.25" CDC drive.  Big-for-the-time, stone 
> reliable, and screaming fast.

Only CDC Drives I used were the CDC/Imprimis/Seagate 327M Sun drive 
(although
I think I have a 150M Imprimis ESDI somewhere).  There was one problem 
with the
327M that if I remember my story straight (which I was told from a 
hardware tech
when I worked for Sun) was there was an issue with the drive in that it 
used a servo
platter/head, and it used one at one extreme end of the 'pack' (I think 
the side closest
to the drive electronics).  Over time because of temp variation within 
the drive, the
track would drift .... and eventually you'd get read/write errors.  I 
did have one 327M
die on me that had read write errors, and that is what the hardware guy 
told me (we
both worked for Sun's support division... he was in hardware, I was in 
Sun's Personal
Answerline (premier software support) group.

I still have some of those 327s around.  Also have a few 600M Micropolis 
drives (
also 5.25" FH SCSI)... those were pretty solid.

I was pretty happy years ago when I got 4 327M Micropolis ESDI drives 
for free,
and bought an enclosure, and rigged them with a MD25A bridgeboard (which 
I got
from an Emulex engineer... it wasn't even the final released version of 
the board)
and ran that on my PC... I had a Gig of storage !!!! whoo hoo.... (I 
still have that Gig...
gotta hook it up one day and make sure I got all the data off it :-) ).

>
>
> (Even though it was a 3600rpm drive.  Lots of platters makes for big 
> fat cylinders.  A 2:1 disadvantage in rotational latency doesn't make 
> for so much of an overall drawback when you have a 4:1 advantage in 
> heads.)
>
>

Makes me think of the Seagate Elite drives.... I opened a dead 9G one 
once... LOTS
of platters !

-- Curt