Hi Gabe,
That sounds like the HPT (head-per-track) disk I worked with on a
Burroughs 3500 & 4700 (?). Big mothers. As you said, and as I recall, it
was one huge disk.
Used to make the raised data center floor rattle some times! This would
have been around 1980-82?
Another Burroughs oddity, at least when I was working on them, was the
4-tape drive clusters. I can't remember the vendor, but it was not Burroughs.
About the size of a washing machine. It used to make a ton of noise as it
tried to find BOT/EOT. Parity errors and retries make it sound like it was
rap-dancing! It was so popular (not), that when we finally decomm'd them,
folks paid $1 USD to hit the cluster with a 16-lb Sledghammer....
Thanks!
BobL
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of
Gabe Goldberg
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2019 3:52 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: [EXT] DASD nostalgia
I mentioned a while ago remembering a friend's long-ago story about disk head
crashes at DEC, resolved by rotating drive cabinet so platters aligned with
loading dock of old mill building (rather than rotating perpendicular to dock's
orientation). Problem had been head crashes when trucks backed into loading
dock and hit/shook building. I asked my friend Who Was There (and who spent his
career in storage architecture/design/etc.). His response:
The disk story is, in fact, true. The disks were from Burroughs, single-platter
and huge (3 foot diameter) with a head per track, if I recall - no seeking.
They were in Building 5, just under the loading docks. They each held about
10MB.
We also received another disk from Burroughs (multiple huge horizontal
platters, seek arms like boxer's arms, heat exchanger) that was so huge, the
freight elevator took it down to the basement lab for testing but couldn't
bring it back up again after - we had to partially disassemble it and bring it
up in pieces. I think it held 50MB.
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