9 Mar
2004
9 Mar
'04
3:15 a.m.
I am quite surprised that they bothered with a brake
without
a good reason - these drives weren't exactly intended to
shifted around a lot, so who cares if it took 5 minutes to
spin down naturally? Mind you, different era I suppose - the
same thing could be argued about a serial diagnostic
interface to the drive, but I'm glad it's there :-)
I don't have anything to hand with prices for an RA8x drive,
but if we skip along one era to the days of the RA90/RA92,
the 1991 DECdirect catalogue shows ?14270 for an RA90 (and
an RA92!) and ?8028 for an RA70 (280MB in case you'd
forgotten). (Obviously you'd go for 4 RA70 drives and
get your 1.1GB discounted to ?28550 :-)).
Having spent a large fortune on your storage you would
almost certainly have it on contract. So the last thing
FS want to have to do is swap it out (??? in time and effort)
only to find back at base that that some lead was loose or
a simple adjustment or fix could have been made on-site.
So I expect that the RS232 connector was there initially
to help debug the thing while it was being designed and
then left in as a useful FS tool.
Antonio
--
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Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org