[COFF] Disk Technology was [Simh] Which PDP-11 to choose

[rp at servium.ch (Rico Pajarola)]

if you still have that story, I'd love to hear it. A quick search didn't
turn up anything except that Super Eagles is a Nigerian football team.


On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 12:59 PM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 at 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 at gmail.com]
>> *Sent:* 02 July 2019 12:47
>> *To:* Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com>
>> *Cc:* Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>; Patrick Finnegan <
>> pat at computer-refuge.org>; COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org>; Tim Wilkinson <
>> tjw at 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 at 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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