[HECnet] Mulita issue

[Dave McGuire]

On Feb 11, 2013, at 2:46 AM, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote:
I have been using barracuda plain scsi-1, external, they are small but
run decent for everything (probably except windoze, never tried to run
it on scsi on alpha.) All three were barracuda, I lost one machine
(the miata, without counting a number of VAX, those have been dying
faster, I'm down to "one" now,) but not the drives.

The noise points to a bad drive, (hopefully not controller,) on linux
boxes, pc and pc server hardware, I have had a lot of disk failures,
sparc, sgi, hp9000 and ibm 6000 are built way better, hardly never
fail, consider that those alpha (and the small drives they came with,)
are now going to be 20 year old in a few months, the VAX is heading
for thirty, in so I expect those old drives to fail sooner or later, I
used to buy them by the lot, and still have boxes of small ones.

I'm more worried when the machines fail, those are hard to replace,
and parts may be really hard to find (like a multia floppy or internal
ide.) Probably is time to image all those drives, and if worse comes
to worse, run on stromasys or simh for the vax.

  The machines themselves are usually easily repaired (though not so much Alphas, but I personally don't think there's much "vintage" about those anyway) and drives will become less of a problem as new adapters are developed.   We already have narrow SCSI<->SATA, etc..

                              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA