info on 160 Mb Winchesters

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From:  Steve Woods <cepu!scw at ucla-locus>


	>Article-I.D.: cubsvax.155

	>Has anyone used either a 168Mbyte Fuji drive (model 2284)
	>or a 160 Mbyte CDC drive (model 9715) with or without an
	>Emulex SC21V unibus controller?  We want to buy a medium
	>sized Winnie and are looking for experience with reliability.
	>I gather that the Fuji is shipping in limited quantities,
	>and has a somewhat higher MTBF.  The CDC supposedly is more
	>readily available and more companies will service it.  Then
	>of course there's the "buy American" argument.  Prices are
	>approximately $5500-$6K each (discounted).  Any suggestions?
	>Any others we should be looking at?

We have 2 Kennedy 53160 drives on our 11/44 (they look exactly like a
CDC 9715).  We are running them on an EMULEX sc21/bm mapped to look
like a total of 4 RM02 drives (2 on each 53160).

The price was (c) the same range as you were discussing, I believe that
we paid $5000 each (Discounted).  We only had one problem with them,
One of the drives had a marginal servo head. The Tech Support people at
Kennedy were *VERY* helpful, and as we are only about 30 miles from the
factory I took my drive over to have them look at it. Well to make a
long story short, they had to replace the servo head (which means that
they had to disassemble the drive and then reassemble it), when ever
they break the seal on a drive they run it at the factory for 36 hours
to make sure that no Krud has crept into it, in addition their service
department is rather small ( 6 techs) and the have a fairly large
number of drives in the field, so it took 2 weeks (actually I brought
the drive in on a Thursday and it was ready on Tues week).  The drives
are reliable, fast and HUGE (the also are VERY quiet, you can't hear
anything from them except the faint Humm of the fan that cools the
transformer in the power supply).  The only thing that ?might? be a
problem is startup power surge ( about 15 amps/drive ), this is much
less that a CDC 9762 (about 20 Amps).  Delivery time was about 3 weeks
from the time that we let the order.

Disclamer: I have no connection with Kennedy in any way, Just a satisfied
customer.

--
Stephen C. Woods (VA Wadsworth Med Ctr./UCLA Dept. of Neurology)
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