Aucbvax.5492
fa.info-vax
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax
Wed Dec 16 16:19:03 1981
Fujitsu winchester disk drives
>From RUBENSTEIN@HARV-10 Wed Dec 16 16:14:32 1981
Here's a summary of what I've learned from INFO-VAX people and from
the guy from System Industries:
All in all, this is an excellent drive. The reliability of the
drive is excellent. It is available from S.I. with either of two
controllers; the 9400 plugs into either the 780 SBI (750 interface
coming soon, they say) and emulates a MassBus, or into the 11/70
Cache Bus, or into a unibus. It has been around for a year and
a bit or so, and is basically the subject of DEC's lawsuit. This
lawsuit, by the way, appears to headed nowhere. Dean.Cornell at UDel
has two 160Mb drives and one of these 9400 controllers.
S.I. also has a new product, the Model 6100 controller. This is meant
for low end unibus PDP-11's but will also work on a VAX if you have no
intention of going to a MassBus. It is maybe $1000 cheaper than
the 9400 series controller. Both have 32-bit ECC, 2K RAM buffer.
The drive with 9400 controller lists for $15,000.
Many other sites have the Fujitsu drive with other controllers; I believe
there are in excess of ten available. alice!ark@Berkeley has
about ten drives on VAX-11/750's and reports no failures with
a year of service. He's using a controller from emulex, which
was also recommended by several other people. Bob Morris
<RAM@MIT-MC> has a fuji on a PDP-11/34 with a Western Peripherals
controller, though he recommends the Emulex, which has
on-board ECC and better bus contention characteristics.
The literature on the drive and controllers from S.I. mostly
stresses how compatible these drives and controllers are with DEC
equipment. The capabilities of the controllers are moderately
impressive, but nowhere near the power of the new UDA50 controller
that DEC is offering with the RA80 winchester. This drive and
controller could be the subject of a whole 'nuther letter, but
suffice it to say that the UDA50 is a light year ahead of any other
controller I've seen (tho my experience is not \that/ extensive).
It sorts its outstanding requests and does seek and rotational
optimization among multiple drives (I.e. does all forward seeks in
order, then turns around and does reverse seeks).
Anyway, the result of all this is that we are NOT (for the moment)
getting this drive (or any drive). The sallesman from S.I.
mentioned that Fujitsu was going to be announcing a new drive
later next year. Ready? 470 Mb unformatted, at "less than $20,000"
including controller! My adviser (Prof E.J. Corey) decided that
we should wait and see, that we might get twice the storage for
less than 50% more bucks. Interesting if true. I wish the
salesman had kept his mouth shut, (and so does he, now) but you
may be interested in following this.
Stew
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