--- Jeffrey Sharp <jss(a)subatomix.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, Jay West wrote:
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.
:-) Of my 12 RA81s, 10 or so have Post-it notes saying "Bad HDA". I'm
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.