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Aucbvax.5491 fa.info-vax utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Wed Dec 16 15:54:11 1981 Fujitsu winchester's from S.I. >From RUBENSTEIN@HARV-10 Wed Dec 16 15:35:46 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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