26 Aug
1998
26 Aug
'98
1:42 p.m.
Bleh,
Well, I did something silly. I bid $26 on an RA81 (DEC) harddrive at
WeirdStuff Warehouse, and I won it.
Very silly.
This means, unfortunately, that I'm going to have
to move the damn thing.
I hope you live in town.
As I understand it, RA81's weigh 148 pounds. I
need some seriously
good tips about how to move the thing without a) killing myself and b)
destroying the drive :)
There are two interlocks to check - the white head lock lever on the HDA,
near the front, and the motor disengage cable. The cable is tricky, because,
IIRC, there are two different release mechanisms - a lever and a cable with
a pull handle that has an embedded brass bead that hangs up on a metal clip.
In either case, you don't want the belt under tension when you move the drive,
lest you wiggle the platters back and forth past the heads.
(Normally, when I buy really heavy things they *roll*.
This thing
doesn't roll :)
Use a steeper hill. It'll roll. ;-)
I have a couple of these things. Fortunately, I just got a pair of RA70's
that will prevent me from having to use an RA81 on a uVAXII. I can't bear
to throw away the RA81's, because they do work. Ah well... that problem will
take care of itself after enough power-on hours have elapsed.
ObFolklore: working customer support, I got a complaint that the RA81's at
a university were dying at a rate of 1 per month. Our customer complained
to DEC about the reliability but were told "those drives have a 50,000 MTBF".
They had enough drives that DEC predicted a failure every few weeks. Needless
to say, the university upgraded to a different drive as soon as possible.