I don't have authoritative info on the cause,
I'm just repeating what I
heard. A highly viscous substance like glue would explain why it took so
long to fail. In any event, it was nasty. Worked perfectly long enough to
build confidence, then failed spectacularly. It was widespread. I entered a
"Sysadmin Horror Story" contest at a USENIX (San Diego?), and won with a
"short story" entry: *Supereagles*. I still have the shark's tooth
trophy.
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 9:41 AM Tim Wilkinson <tjw(a)twsoft.co.uk> wrote:
Interesting that it was the platter bonding. The explanation SI gave us
(They sold us the super Eagles along with their controller) was that it was
a lubricant. So I had assumed a bearing seal fail.
Anyway after about 4 swap outs and a lot of lifting they lasted a further
15 years until we knocked down the office with the original 750 and its big
brother an 8810 still in the computer room as all the resellers wanted
certificates of continuing maintenance that would have cost more than they
were willing to pay for those vaxs.
*From:* John P. Linderman [mailto:jpl.jpl@gmail.com]
*Sent:* 02 July 2019 12:47
*To:* Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
*Cc:* Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>; Patrick Finnegan <
pat(a)computer-refuge.org>; COFF <coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org>; Tim Wilkinson <
tjw(a)twsoft.co.uk>
*Subject:* Re: [COFF] Disk Technology was [Simh] Which PDP-11 to choose
There were eagles, and then there were super-eagles. Our experience with
eagles was great, and we were eager to try the (larger) super-eagles. We
soaked them for a month or so, then put them into production use.
Whereupon, they started dropping like flies. It turns out the glue they
used to attach the platters to the spindle slowly crept out over time,
eventually coming to grief with a read/write head. This experience was
wide-spread, and seriously damaged Fujitsu's reputation.
On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 10:11 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 01, 2019 at 09:49:42AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
An Eagle or Eagle-II was a whole lot lighter
(and physically smaller)
than
an RP06 or RP07 (or an RM series drive for that
matter). It is
interesting
to hear you had problems with the Eagles. They
were generally
considered
the best/most reliable of the day. The SI
controller on the Vax was
less
so, although many of us in the UNIX community
used them.
We ran Eagles on the Masscomps we had at Geophysics. Nothing but good
things to say about those drives.
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