The Gun Counter

We bid a fond farewell to the third oldest hard drive in operation here at work; a Quantum Fireball 8.4s SCSI, an 8.4GB 5400RPM unit. It ran, in a MicroVAX 3100, for 10 years nearly 24x7 (power outages and two moves were the only downtimes). Fireballs were _cheap_ drives despite being made in Japan; this one was used as a large (!) capacity storage drive for noncritical files (basically an online archive). It was backed up and no data was lost when it decided it just could not work any longer.

When something so cheap runs so well for so long you've got to give it kudos. We took another of the same drive (NIB, the last we had from a bulk purchase around 2001) off the shelf, tested it hard for a day, and stuck it in the system. We'll see how long it lasts. We need a small drive because the antique OS version limits drive size to ~8.4GB and its too expensive to update.

And I get two more fun magnets and some shiny disks to play with If I can get the motor apart my wife will get another pretty 'metal flower' (the rotor) for her crafts.

(the 204MB and 425MB DEC drives in the workstation are still running

WOW!! That was a 5400 RPM drive at 8.4GB???

That it lasted as long as it did doesn't surprise me. Lots of our old SCSI drive run non-stop for almost a decade. We had one SCSI drive which had frozen solid in a Sun workstation. Since the drive was dead for all intents and purposes, my boss gave me the go-ahead and open the drive and manually unfreeze the drive by manually moving the platters so they'd spin.

I unstuck the platters (only touching the edges of the disks) and closed the drive back up. We hooked it all back up and restarted the machine which booted normally (after a drive check), and immediately backed up all the data on that drive to another machine and external drive. The funny thing is that the drive continued to run non-stop for another four years, without problems, until a janitor fried the drive by plugging his vacuum cleaner (NOT his fault) into the same circuit the drive was plugged into and when the janitor turned on his vacuum, sparks and smoke were seen to come from the Sun drive box (thankfully nothing important was stored on that box anymore - EVERYTHING was backed up and replicated on various other drives and machines to not lose the data). Apparently the odor of the fried box was discernible all the way out to the elevators, and several geeks were heard to quip that that machine/box fought HARD to not give up the ghost and had a strong desire to keep running. They said something to the effect that "that box did NOT want to die and fought to keep running, especially after being resurrected." And *I* was the person who resurrected it. I gave it life after it died, and apparently it fought hard to stay alive.

Are you crazy if you believe some electronics can respond to you, understand how you feel, kill your watches (my wife does this with EVERY watch she's ever worn), screw up your electronic devices, and generally create havoc around themselves if they stay around sensitive electronics????

A buddy of mine is death on digital watches. He had one that froze and held the same time for several years until the battery ran out on it. My problem with wrist watches is I never remember to take them off before doing heavy outside work, and end up breaking the crystal. So far my Watch, Wrist, Navigators is holding up with just a few scuffs. (Which is a good thing, since under the crystal is over a dozen little tubes of tritium...)

Best part about watches is that a 10 dollar POS will last you DECADES, and who cares if it breaks?

My $38 watch, a Casio DW200, lasted me from early 1980s until 2007 when a battery change damaged the o-ring and I could not find a replacement (It still works fine, but the crystal silkscreening was damaged when water got in). I'd be wearing it today if I could find the o-ring even with the cosmetic damage.

They say the base Casio F91W, which is a $10-14 watch, is one of the most popular in the world, and especially in third world countries because its cheap and it lasts and lasts.



I still have a working 65MB SCSI drive at home (Seagate ST277N) attached to an Apple //GS system. It only gets run once every few months anymore, not full time, so its not a fair comparison. Starts up every time though. Same with the old VAXstation at work (which does run 24x7 because it takes way too long to boot!); even though the drives are approaching 23 years old they just keep working. I'll be sad when they die.

A friend of mine from way back could destroy any piece of electrical equipment just by switching it on. I'm not sure how, there isn't any physical explanation I can think of.

We used to call him "Captain Electro"

That's really funny. Back in the day (late 90's is when I got exposed to them) Fireballs had a bad rep for high failure rates. Getting that kind of life out of one, that's a lot of sigmas.

Greg wrote:That's really funny. Back in the day (late 90's is when I got exposed to them) Fireballs had a bad rep for high failure rates. Getting that kind of life out of one, that's a lot of sigmas.

I think the SCSI models weren't made the same as concurrent and later IDE Fireball drives that were aimed squarely at consumer wintel desktops (after all you bought a crappy OS odds were you weren't going to spend much for your storage subsystem ) (heh, says the person who installed that $xx hard drive in a $25,000+ computer because the boss wouldn't let him get the pricy drives designed for it). The SCSI fireballs were not by any means server class or enterprise class drives, but almost anything SCSI was built on better base hardware than the consumer fluff of the day because it was assumed it would be used harder/longer. I've taken apart IDE fireballs for the magnets and motor rotors and everything in them was chintzier and cheaper than the SCSI fireball I just broke down (and I think the IDE's mechanism was made in Honduras or some other location, instead of Japan). Smaller magnets too.

Rich Jordan wrote:

Greg wrote:That's really funny. Back in the day (late 90's is when I got exposed to them) Fireballs had a bad rep for high failure rates. Getting that kind of life out of one, that's a lot of sigmas.

I think the SCSI models weren't made the same as concurrent and later IDE Fireball drives that were aimed squarely at consumer wintel desktops (after all you bought a crappy OS odds were you weren't going to spend much for your storage subsystem ) (heh, says the person who installed that $xx hard drive in a $25,000+ computer because the boss wouldn't let him get the pricy drives designed for it). The SCSI fireballs were not by any means server class or enterprise class drives, but almost anything SCSI was built on better base hardware than the consumer fluff of the day because it was assumed it would be used harder/longer.

I never compared because I only ever saw the SCSI ones. But that wouldn't surprise me at all, about the IDE models just being crappier in general it was certainly common enough. This was for work for a small server, so it was SCSI but we had a small budget so we got a less expensive drive. Had a 1GB model fail on me and when I researched it online I found I wasn't the only one....

For a while in the late 90's the computer store I worked out carried Quantum Bigfoot drives because he got a great deal on them. We had a 200+% failure rate on them. (Drive fail, replace under warranty, drive fail ...)