On Nov 4, 2013, at 12:39 PM, JP Hindin <jplist2008 at kiwigeek.com> wrote:
The machine has four M7552/KRQ50 controllers for the
RRD50 CDROM drives,
each of which appears to support four individual drives.
Would it be normal to hang 16 RRD50s off a single VAX, or have I got
something a bit odd?
My friend suggests an optical media fileserver as a guess, which makes
sense, but not being from the generation of which these machines were
actually in use, I wasn't sure if such things existed. Seems like a hell
of a waste of a VAX, but perhaps I'm underestimating how uncommon these
were.
VAXen were pretty common as medium- to high-duty fileservers. Given
the relative expense of CD drives at the time of an MVII, it would make
some sense to have them as a shared resource rather than distributed to
individual workstations. Bear in mind the ease with which one can
cluster even low-end VAXen running VMS.
I don't know what the general availability of CD jukeboxes were at the
time, but that wouldn't provide you concurrent access to more than one
at a time per jukebox, anyway.
- Dave