crp@stcvax.UUCP (Charlie Price) (05/16/84)
Yes, it's true, Storage Technology is building an optical disk system.
I don't happen to be in that division, but I know a little bit about
the drive and can tell you what it is.
First, STC mostly makes IBM mainframe plug compatible peripherals
and the optical disk is intended to hook up to a 308X or similar machine.
It is high-capacity, fast, and expensive compared to something like
the Optimem.
It has a 14 inch diameter platter in a handling cartrige and that will
store 4 gigabytes of data. The platter can be changed quickly.
The interface to the drive runs at fast
IBM channel speed of 3 Mbytes/sec for read/write. I think the disk is
actually that fast, but I'm not certain -- the interface runs at that
speed for a while anyway.
The servo is reasonably fast -- something like a fast magnetic disk.
People are probably interested in the drive price, and I don't know what
a good number to say is -- the price of drives in this range tends to vary
a bunch depending on the kind of contract that you make so there isn't
a single number even if we were delivering them now.
I think that the drive price is under $100K but it is somewhere
up in that neighborhood.
The first drive shipped is at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(one usenet machine at NCAR is the High Altitude Observatory -- hao).
They are working on hooking the drive up and writing device control software.
I believe that they are hooking it up to an NSC Hyperchannel (50 Mbit/sec)
network interface since NSC understands IBM channel protocols.
In any case, the drive is supposed
to hold data for their big systems (a couple of Crays).
NCAR has an incredible data storage problem, by report they
have data sets larger than our platter size!!
Our shipping schedule has been reduced this calendar year to something
like 40-80 units because, naturally, the engineering in a new field
isn't working out as well as people want it to and
STC is especially interested in doing the engineering BEFORE we ship
a whole bunch of units to the field.
The optical media is one that we hope will be a standard for at least
the big drives -- if that works out, we can replace this first drive
with something smaller and cheaper as better technology becomes
available and the media will be the same.
To put this "huge" drive in perspective, our newest IBM compatible
magnetic disk drive has 2500 Mbytes (yes, 2500) of storage,
3 Mbyte/sec data rate, and 16 ms average access time.
It has two spindles (two head-disk assemblies)
each of which has two actuators and with our dual-port
architecture you can get to any 2 (of 4) actuators in a drive at a time
(if you have two control modules).
By the way, what I do here at STC is build in-house test equipment
for disk manufacturing. We build various sorts of testers
for heads and disks, servo track writers, and HDA level testers.
All of the new testers are controlled by embedded microprocessors
running as satellite processors to UNIX host systems!
Charlie Price - STC (disk division)
uucp: { hao, ihnp4, decvax}!stcvax!crp
{ allegra, amd70, ucbvax }!nbires!stcvax!crp
USnail: Storage Technology Corp - MD 3T / Louisville, CO / 80028
DDD: (303) 673-5698
Subject: Writable optical disks -- from Storage Technology
Newsgroups: net.perhiphs
Yes, it's true, Storage Technology is building an optical disk system.
I don't happen to be in that division, but I know a little bit about
the drive and can tell you what it is.
First, STC mostly makes IBM mainframe plug compatible peripherals
and the optical disk is intended to hook up to a 308X or similar machine.
It is high-capacity, fast, and expensive compared to something like
the Optimem.
It has a 14 inch diameter platter in a handling cartrige and that will
store 4 gigabytes of data. The platter can be changed quickly.
The interface to the drive runs at fast
IBM channel speed of 3 Mbytes/sec for read/write. I think the disk is
actually that fast, but I'm not certain -- the interface runs at that
speed for a while anyway.
The servo is reasonably fast -- something like a fast magnetic disk.
People are probably interested in the drive price, and I don't know what
a good number to say is -- the price of drives in this range tends to vary
a bunch depending on the kind of contract that you make so there isn't
a single number even if we were delivering them now.
I think that the drive price is under $100K but it is somewhere
up in that neighborhood.
The first drive shipped is at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(one usenet machine at NCAR is the High Altitude Observatory -- hao).
They are working on hooking the drive up and writing device control software.
I believe that they are hooking it up to an NSC Hyperchannel (50 Mbit/sec)
network interface since NSC understands IBM channel protocols.
In any case, the drive is supposed
to hold data for their big systems (a couple of Crays).
NCAR has an incredible data storage problem, by report they
have data sets larger than our platter size!!
Our shipping schedule has been reduced this calendar year to something
like 40-80 units because, naturally, the engineering in a new field
isn't working out as well as people want it to and
STC is especially interested in doing the engineering BEFORE we ship
a whole bunch of units to the field.
The optical media is one that we hope will be a standard for at least
the big drives -- if that works out, we can replace this first drive
with something smaller and cheaper as better technology becomes
available and the media will be the same.
To put this "huge" drive in perspective, our newest IBM compatible
magnetic disk drive has 2.5 Mbytes of storage, 3 Mbyte/sec data rate,
and 16 ms average access time. It has two spindles (two head-disk
assemblies) each of which has two actuators and with our dual-port
architecture you can get to any 2 (of 4) actuators in a drive at a time
(if you have two control modules).
By the way, what I do here at STC is build in-house test equipment
for disk manufacturing. We build various sorts of testers
for heads and disks, servo track writers, and HDA level testers.
All of the new testers are controlled by embedded microprocessors
running as satellite processors to UNIX host systems!
Charlie Price - STC (disk division)
uucp: { hao, ihnp4, decvax}!stcvax!crp
{ allegra, amd70, ucbvax }!nbires!stcvax!crp
USnail: Storage Technology Corp - MD 3T / Louisville, CO / 80028
DDD: (303) 673-5698
--
Charlie Price - STC (disk division)
uucp: { hao, ihnp4, decvax}!stcvax!crp
{ allegra, amd70, ucbvax }!nbires!stcvax!crp
USnail: Storage Technology Corp - MD 3T / Louisville, CO / 80028
DDD: (303) 673-5698
--
Charlie Price - STC (disk division)
uucp: { hao, ihnp4, decvax}!stcvax!crp
{ allegra, amd70, ucbvax }!nbires!stcvax!crp
USnail: Storage Technology Corp - MD 3T / Louisville, CO / 80028
DDD: (303) 673-5698crp@stcvax.UUCP (Charlie Price) (05/16/84)
[two previous versions of this got sent and hopefully cancelled]
Yes, it's true, Storage Technology is building an optical disk system.
I don't happen to be in that division, but I know a little bit about
the drive and can tell you what it is.
First, STC mostly makes IBM mainframe plug compatible peripherals
and the optical disk is intended to hook up to a 308X or similar machine.
It is high-capacity, fast, and expensive compared to something like
the Optimem.
It has a 14 inch diameter platter in a handling cartrige and that will
store 4 gigabytes of data. The platter can be changed quickly.
The interface to the drive runs at fast
IBM channel speed of 3 Mbytes/sec for read/write. I think the disk is
actually that fast, but I'm not certain -- the interface runs at that
speed for a while anyway.
The servo is reasonably fast -- something like a fast magnetic disk.
People are probably interested in the drive price, and I don't know what
a good number to say is -- the price of drives in this range tends to vary
a bunch depending on the kind of contract that you make so there isn't
a single number even if we were delivering them now.
I think that the drive price is under $100K but it is somewhere
up in that neighborhood.
The first drive shipped is at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(one usenet machine at NCAR is the High Altitude Observatory -- hao).
They are working on hooking the drive up and writing device control software.
I believe that they are hooking it up to an NSC Hyperchannel (50 Mbit/sec)
network interface since NSC understands IBM channel protocols.
In any case, the drive is supposed
to hold data for their big systems (a couple of Crays).
NCAR has an incredible data storage problem, by report they
have data sets larger than our platter size!!
Our shipping schedule has been reduced this calendar year to something
like 40-80 units because, naturally, the engineering in a new field
isn't working out as well as people want it to and
STC is especially interested in doing the engineering BEFORE we ship
a whole bunch of units to the field.
The optical media is one that we hope will be a standard for at least
the big drives -- if that works out, we can replace this first drive
with something smaller and cheaper as better technology becomes
available and the media will be the same.
To put this "huge" drive in perspective, our newest IBM compatible
magnetic disk drive has 2500 Mbytes (yes, 2.5 Gbytes) of storage,
3 Mbyte/sec data rate, and 16 ms average access time.
It has two spindles (two head-disk assemblies)
each of which has two actuators and with our dual-port
architecture you can get to any 2 (of 4) actuators in a drive at a time
(if you have two control modules).
By the way, what I do here at STC is build in-house test equipment
for disk manufacturing. We build various sorts of testers
for heads and disks, servo track writers, and HDA level testers.
All of the new testers are controlled by embedded microprocessors
running as satellite processors to UNIX host systems!
--
Charlie Price - STC (disk division)
uucp: { hao, ihnp4, decvax}!stcvax!crp
{ allegra, amd70, ucbvax }!nbires!stcvax!crp
USnail: Storage Technology Corp - MD 3T / Louisville, CO / 80028
DDD: (303) 673-5698