Subject: ebay bid on dec rack

From: "Jay West" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Mar 26 06:17:29 2003

FYI - I'm likely going to be bidding on the DEC "3 high" rack on Ebay that
includes an RA81. The RA81 is missing the HDA, and I have no need for it, I
just want the rack as it's the right height to mate to my 11/44X. If anyone
wants the RA81-HDA, let me know before it gets skipped.

Jay West

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From: Jeffrey Sharp <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Mar 27 12:34:37 2003

On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, Jay West wrote:
> includes an RA81. The RA81 is missing the HDA, and I have no need for it,
> I just want the rack as it's the right height to mate to my 11/44X. If
> anyone wants the RA81-HDA, let me know before it gets skipped.

:-) Of my 12 RA81s, 10 or so have Post-it notes saying "Bad HDA". I'm
starting to see a pattern here...

-- 
Jeffrey Sharp

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From: lee courtney <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Mar 27 12:36:10 2003

Jay,

I have one of these minus the RA81 you have for free
in Menlo Park area. Note its missing a top cover and a
front panel. Well almost free - you have to pick up.
Email me if interested.

Lee Courtney

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From: Ethan Dicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Mar 27 12:36:32 2003

> starting to see a pattern here...

No more than 50% of my RA81s are functional.

We had a customer that complained to DEC that every month they had
a head crash on an RA-81.  DEC responded with some statistic about
MTBF.  They went back and forth a few times until someone divided 
the number of spindles they had into the MTBF number and converted
it to days - it was approximately 30.  :-)

The customer elected to go with a smaller number of higher capacity
drives and the problem went away (mostly because the MTBF of later
models was *much* higher per spindle).

There was a notorious problem with a formula change with an adhesive.
I don't recall the HDA rev letter, but drives from the wrong batch
would fail in record time.  Big scramble for DEC to plug the gap.

I think I've seen one drive die due to electronic failure, ever.

-ethan

P.S. - Somewhere I have a receipt for one at, IIRC, $26,000.  Not my
money, thankfully.  They were still a few thousand $$$ in 1988.

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From: Huw Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Mar 27 12:44:05 2003

>would fail in record time.  Big scramble for DEC to plug the gap.

I can certainly confirm that there were significant problems with glue 
"migrating" onto the platters in RA81s. At the site I was working at in 
about 1982 we ordered two RA81s and suitable controller to augment our 
storage - we had an RM80 as system disk and two RM03s for user data - these 
were the good old days! These were some of the first RA81s delivered in 
Australia - I like to say that we had the first two RA81s in Australia 
along with about 10 of the next few shipments as well. It got to the stage 
where my Field Service engineer and I could replace an RA81 HDA in about 15 
minutes.

>I think I've seen one drive die due to electronic failure, ever.

The most entertaining RA81 failure we had (glue induced failures excepted) 
was when the drive select switches on drive 1 failed. The controller 
detected duplicate IDs and spun _both_ RA81s down. Took a long while to 
work out why every time the second drive was powered up, the first would 
spin down....

Huw Davies           | e-mail: [email-masked]
Melbourne            | "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia            | air, the sky would be painted green"

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From: "John Allain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Mar 27 12:51:48 2003

> FYI - I'm likely going to be bidding on the DEC "3 high" rack on 
> Ebay that includes an RA81. The RA81 is missing the HDA, and
> I have no need for it, I just want the rack as it's the right height to
> mate to my 11/44X. If anyone wants the RA81-HDA, let me know
> before it gets skipped.

Will comply.
Similarly, if anybody wants to subdivide the 8 x RA92 rack
with me that's fine.  I only want 2 or 4 max, but let me know.

John A.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri Mar 28 12:49:53 2003

New Jersey or California?

Peace...  Sridhar

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From: Gunther Schadow <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Mar 31 19:04:52 2003

So, did you end up getting this rack? I have enough RA8x but one of them
needs the big Capacitor that will (hopefully) make it spin up again.
So, if you have any spare ...

Also, I have 2 racks one half high and another full height, of mid 90s
StorageWorks gear, just the racks. I am too embarrassed to ask if
anyone wants them, but they do go to the scrap yard soon. Indianapolis
is the place.

thanks
-Gunther