18 Oct
2009
18 Oct
'09
6:04 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 4:55 PM, <arcarlini at
iee.org> wrote:
Starting around 1997, I was using a Pentium 166 MMX with 2 * Hitachi 1.5
GB DK516-15
ESDI FH 5.25" hard drives as my storage devices. They were my C: and D:
drives with the
D: drive serving ONLY as a backup. I still have a few around which were
also used on a
BA123 running RT-11 on a PDP-11/83 with a Sigma RQD11-EC ESDI Qbus
controller.
I stopped using them for the PC around 2002 when I switched to a Pentium
III with 3.5 " drives.
These were 3 * Maxtor D540X-4X of 40 GB each. Unfortunately, the
Maxtor drives failed
around 2006 when I switched to 160 GB drives.
On the other hand, I still occasionally use the Hitachi DK516-15 ESDI
drives on the BA123.
It would seem that except for the RD53 drives, all of the old MFM and
ESDI drives that I used
with a DEC system still work. But the IDE drives, especially the Maxtor
drives, lasted only 3 years.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
The DEC RD54 (Maxtor XT-2190) was 159MB or so. I
once had a brace of
them on a PC.
I had a PCs or two with a Micropolis 1325, but I'd already converted
over to Adaptec SCSI controllers and embedded SCSI drives (frequently
surplus/castoffs from a Sun environment) rather than go above about
60MB on MFM/ST412. I didn't get an IDE drive for anything until after
1992 - it was all small MFM and large(er) SCSI for my sub-32-bit
environments. Any "large" disks ended up going on VAXen and PDP-11s.
The idea of a PC with "a brace" of FH 5.25" drives on it is somewhat
daunting. The closest thing I can imagine to it is a fully-loaded
BA123, and I've never *seen* one of those above two or three spindles.