mikes@sir-alan.UUCP (Mike Squires) (04/13/87)
I purchased two 2080 drives from Sharon Industries for $550 each (now priced
at $695 each). Drive 1 formatted without problems, one bad track. Drive
2 did not work until I removed the jumper that caused the drive to endlessly
run diagnostics (E4, by the way); it formatted then with one error. Drive 2
has a mechanical noise that appears now only at power-up/down; it appears
to be something loose in the drive bubble itself but it seems to have no
effect on the operation of the drive. A third drive was send out to
replace the "bad" drive by Sharon Industries BEFORE the second one was
returned. This drive was DOA and minor efforts to resucicate it failed.
The drives came in factory sealed Quantum boxes minus their test results;
Drive B had all the PCB-to-bubble screws and the RFI shield between the
PCB and the bubble missing (I stole the one from drive 3).
The drives bolt up to the 8MB case holes once the carrier is removed. The
only mod necessary for operation was that of slitting the data cable to
allow line 5 to be pulled high by the Write Protect switch (yellow lead
on Write Protect switch). Once modified the drive case is
indistinguishable from the outside from a standard case.
XENIX 3.1 allows for only 1024 cylinders (Why did you change that, boys?)
according to Podnar of Microtime. XENIX 1.3 and 3.0 allowed all 1178 cylinders
of a 2080 to be used; running under XENIX 3.1 causes the loss of 150 cylinders
or about 10% of the space. The drive formats at 120,000 blocks; I am using
a 8192 block swapper which leaves about 59MB for the filesystem.
The 2040 is a possible alternative; it costs $395 and should format to 33MB.
It is not identical to the 2080 in mechanical design and may be slower. The
2080 is listed as a 40ms average access drive, but it runs about 2x the speed
of the CMI 6640 which is listed as a 39ms drive. The 16 (6Mhz 68000) runs
the Byte multiprocess benchmark at about 75% of the speed of a VAX 750 under
BSD 4.1 and 2x the speed of a 6000 with a CMI 6640 primary when equipped
with a 2080.
Result: For $695 a cheap and very fast upgrade to the 16/6000. I also
found Sharon Industries to be fast and responsive, as well as responsible.
Michael L. Squires Office: 814-724-3360
Department of Political Science Home: 814-337-5528
Allegheny College
Meadville, PA 16335
uucp: ..!decvax!cwruecmp!ncoast!{mikes,peng!sir-alan!mikes}
..!pitt!sir-alan!mikes
BITNET: mikes%sir-alan@pitt.UUCP