VAX@UMKCVAX1.BITNET (12/24/87)
Netlanders,
We currently have an HSC50 and 6 RA81's for disk storage, and were thinking
of replacing them with RA82's. Any comments on reliability, performance,
bugs, etc.? Special handling to make life easier?
We might consider some third party drives. We had some before, but got
bitten around V3.5 VMS when DEC changed their drivers(?) and the device driver
stopped working for these drives. The company didn't come up with a patch
for months, and finally we got rid of them without ever getting them back
online. They were wonderful drives (Eagle drives, circa 1982), but hate to get
stuck with staying at lower versions of VMS, esp. with V5.0 coming. Has this
kind of thing been solved, or does it still happen?
There are some other considerations. For instance, how long does it take
to compress a disk with a backup/restore operation (it currently takes 1.5 -
2.5 wall hours disk to disk)?
Also, if I have it straight, one cannot initialize these disks (RA82 or
larger) with a cluster size of 1 since they have too many blocks for that
(can't have over 1 Meg of clusters on a disk?).
Has anyone heard of a new disk on the horizon (RA90?, around 1G? storage)?
If there is interest, I'll post a summary on the net.
Barry Kierstein
Kierstei@Umkcvax1
From a friend, "If you don't give away your insanity, you keep it."