4 ms·
When you're having a good time a "few years" is pretty short. :-) Our RM80's were trouble free from what I can remember. We had an air conditioned, electrostat
by ratsmack 11y ago
When you're having a good time a "few years" is pretty short. :-)
Our RM80's were trouble free from what I can remember. We had an air conditioned, electrostatic filtered clean room for our systems which also included some PDP11's and PDP11/40's with RL02's and RK07 disk drives. The room had very limited access and you had to wear booties. The only time we lost a drive is when one of the RK07's went crazy, slamming the heads against the hard stops causing the heads to crash onto the disk.
- hga 11y agoFrom everything I've heard, RK07s were ... subpar. I'm not surprised one failed like that. RL02s were meh, but they worked, the first system I was responsible for had 1 or 2 of them. I asked because the RA81 which was released in 1982 was, in MIT's Project Athena experience, awful, they had some sort of problem with glue, and they were losing 1 a week out of a population of no more than 40 drives (!). But it sounds like they were more careful, more lucky, whatever with the earlier RM80s, which I don't remember hearing anything bad about.
- linker3000 11y agoThe company at which I was working purchased a second hand VAX 11/750 system around 1984 and a Digital engineer came in to help us re-commission it. Everything went well until the RM05 (256MB) disk pack performed a random-seek confidence test; it was then that we discovered that its feet had not been screwed down to the floor and the whole unit started to breakdance around the computer room like a deranged washing machine. Two of us leapt at the unit and held it down until the test completed.