[HECnet] Drives for a VAX-11/730

[Clem Cole]

We had a number of CDC 9766 & Fujistu Eagle drives at UCB on the 780s and 750s.      I don't remember special cables other than the two SMD cables from the controller.    We had both SI and Emulex controllers (SBI based) for them, and I do remember there was a preference for one over the other, but at this point I do not remember which was considered better.    I think is was the Emulex ones - but I did not think those will work on a 730 - we never had them at UCB.

By the time of the 730 was released many (??most??) performance based customers were abandoning Vaxen and moving to Masscomp, Sun, and Apollo (68K based) because the 730 was expensive and so much slower [I used to goad one of the lead 730 designers that the 730 was the greatest gift to the UNIX / 68K community, because it meant most anyone could easily beat a "Vax" in a benchmark].    Actually it was interesting time, you could tell a lot about a firm in their advertising.   The solid firms with products that lasted would benchmark against the 780 or 785, the weaker ones would use a 730 and talk about it being a "Vax" and then in fine print say it as 730.

Clem


On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 10:14 PM, John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote:
From: "Bob Armstrong" <bob at jfcl.com>

>As I remember, the RM02/3/5 were CDC 9760-something drives, which were SMD.
>Of course it's possible that the DEC OEM versions had customized interfaces.

Yes, DEC made a bunch of gratuitous changes, although it might be possible
to duplicate them with another drive.   IIRC they reversed the polarity of
most/all of the signals on one cable (it's differential so you can fix that
by swapping wires), and the direction of the unit-select lines is reversed
(so the plug in the drive tells the RM adapter what Massbus unit to be,
rather than telling the drive what SMD unit to be).   I think there are
a few other things but the basic I/O interface is the same.

My 11/730 has a UDA50 + RA81 instead of the RB730, and was bootable last
time it was anything-able, FWIW.   So I'd think a CDU720/etc. would work
fine too.

John Wilson
D Bit