Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU!welch From: welch@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Arun Welch) Newsgroups: comp.sys.xerox Subject: 300 Mb disk packs Message-ID: <8811232008.AA14612@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 23 Nov 88 20:08:01 GMT References: <8811231946.AA13376@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 32 From: JAY FERGUSON Subject: RE: 300 Mb disk packs >Are the Century Media drives direct plug-compatible with the 1186? Jay, Your answer made it back to me rather than to the original poster, but I can answer it anyway... We're talking about the 300-MB drives for the NS 8000 file servers here, not for the 1186. These drives come in two forms, the removable disk pacs, and the non-removable. The removable beasties are a pretty standard form, and we're using ones scavenged from the rp06 drives on our dec-20 on our NS servers. The fixed-disk kind come in all kinds of flavors, and you have to specify the interface you want. The hard part these days is getting non-scuzzy drives anymore. The kind you want were originally made by Control Data, who are now a Xerox company, so you can even get them with a Xerox label on the front, and the interface is called a Trident interface, which plugs into the various spots on the server pretty easily. Obviously, when we're talking fixed-disk kind we're talking about some more hardware than just the removable platters, and the drive runs a couple grand, rather than the couple hundred for just the platters. The only thing I've ever heard about putting big disks on an 1186, modulo the 80Mb drives, was some experimentation that Eric Schoen was doing with hooking up the Symbolics bricks to the 1186. I'm not sure what sort of success he had, maybe someone at Sumex can expand. ...arun