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From: jc@piaget.UUCP (John Cornelius)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs
Subject: Re: CDC 3-year warranty believable?
Message-ID: <130@piaget.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Dec-86 10:23:36 EST
Article-I.D.: piaget.130
Posted: Thu Dec 11 10:23:36 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Dec-86 21:49:51 EST
References: <4647@mimsy.UUCP> <1306@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <4685@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: jc@piaget.UUCP (John Cornelius, System Manager)
Organization: International Widget
Lines: 43
Summary: 9771s are hard to fix

In article <4685@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
->>In article <4647@mimsy.UUCP> I mentioned
->>>... our source machine is down with broken CDC 9771 drives.
->
->In article <1306@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
->(System Mangler) writes:
->>More than one broken?
->
->Well, one for certain: 
->	....
->We have DEC service on the 9771s, because another campus group had
->trouble with CDC service.  Whether DEC know how to repair CDC drives
->remains to be seen, but it is unlikely they will be worse than CDC.

I sold a 9771 to a good customer once.  DEC took it under maintenance
and when the HDA went it took DEC a month to figure out that they
couldn't fix it.  CDC then took another 2 months to fix it and I think 
they did it by replacing the drive.  I had to loan the customer an 
Eagle so that he could run while DEC and CDC were tripping over their
ties.  DEC subsequently removed the 9771 from the maintenance contract
and hasn't taken on any more that I know of.

I probably would not sell a 9771 to anyone except DEC or CDC;  I figure
that they deserve each other's service organizations.

I have had crashes on other manufacturer's drives as well and the 
differnce in service is astonishing. When I was selling Century drives
they discovered a problem in the HDA and recalled all of the drives in
the field that had the problem.  They sent out new drives to swap out
with the drives that had the problem BEFORE the old drives broke.  Even
though that meant more work for me it was a lot less work than having to
have one of you guys pummel me about having a busted HDA and all the 
data that you lost.

By the way, Century has a current product with 800 Megabytes of data and
in the second quarter of next year will be delivering a 1 Gigabyte product.
These are all 8" drives so in a 5' rack you can get about 10 Gigabytes.
Access times are a quite respectable 16ms average and latency is the 
usual 8 ms or thereabouts.

-- 
John Cornelius
(...!sdcsvax!piaget!jc)