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Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz'
Hamster Of Death writes "Iomega has begun selling its 'son of Jaz' removable hard drive, Rev. Pitched as an alternative to tape back-up rigs, Rev provides 35GB of uncompressed storage capacity per 2.5in removable disk. The disk is mounted inside a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge, and yields a 25MBps transfer rate - eight times faster than DDS-4 tape, Iomega claims."
it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me buying an Iomega product again
I could buy 3 large external hard drives or more for the money. Any of the hard drives from Maxtor, WD etc. are less costly than the media alone.
I like that Iomega is finally realizing where their market share is. They can't compete with CD's and DVD's but a new tape alternative sounds interesting.
vampirical
Did you hear something?...
Click of death.
http://www.kontentdesign.com/
I don't know about everyone else, but my experience has been that Iomega magnetic disk drives and media are unreliable. I wouldn't trust my data to this even if it was 100GB/cart.
From the article: "Iomega Rev disks are engineered to provide an extremely durable and reliable shelf life, estimated to exceed 30 years," it [the company] added.
Not trying to start a flamewar - I'd really like to see how they were able to get such high reliability, and how they got to the "30 year" number. If it's true that's unprecedented reliability. (Or is it just the shelf life of the material?)
I'm a 2000 man.
10x8x8cm...
1x.8x.8 cm would be a recipie for lost backups.
The Slashdot post is wrong. It's actually 10cm x 8cm x 0.8cm.
eclecti.cc
It seems like a new storage standard comes out every week, unless something sets this apart from zip drives, usb flash hd's, mem sticks, a billion other things, I don't see it gaining much market share. Something will come out in the next six months to eclipse this, well before it gains substantial market share.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Not very practical if you ask me...something better would be an external high capacity firewaire/USB 2 hard drive...cheaper and better if you ask me
The article lists the cartridge size as 10cm x 8cm x 8cm. That'd be one of those littls shuttle PCs.
.8cm x .8cm. That'd be about the size of a wristwatch.
.8cm
The blurb above lists it as 1cm x
So, how big is this thing? My guess is 10cm x 8cm x
There's no Mac or Linux support - Iomega (at one point in time) was HUGE in the Mac Owner's hardware regime (especially at ad agencies)
Since "the click of death fiasco" and the fact that Zip carts never really decreased in price, a lot of Mac users switched to CDRs.
Why doesn't Iomega get the fact that CD drives = everyone has them - Rev drives - NO ONE HAS THEM?
This is like Gateway - Gateway SEEMS to have thought people actually WANTED their flavor of PC - Iomega seems to think people WANT their proprietary standard!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I just wonder if these things will be as shoddy as Jaz drives were? At my work we used to use Jaz drives to make images of machines onto, which we would then burn to CD. The problem is, after about a month's use the cardtridges would start failing. Granted we probably used them a lot more than most places would, given that we would fill them up, and then erase them at least once a day; however, its was still a very expensive way to make images. In the end we ditched the removable media and set up a network to do our imaging over, which has saved us a ton of money, and countless man-hours of screwing with failing cardtridges. I wonder if the new cardtridges will be any better?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
in todays content based world is 35GB enough. I work for a mid sized architecture firm. our back up typically is 60 GB every day on DLT tapes. A DLT tape costs in the range of $40 where as an 40/80 DLT drive is around $600. So I dont really see this being a viable alternative to the existing technology. The other question I have is how well does the disk hold up to abuse. aren't most drive based solutions pretty tempermental when it comes to shock damage ?
Check out EE Times article on the drive. Of course, you could always get a 60GB drive for less ($47 shipped) from pricewatch, but if Iomega can ramp this up quicker, it'll get price-competitive again.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The second story down is somewhat on-topic . . .
Tech support tales.
-Peter
About 7 years ago IOmega had a product called the Jaz drive that was like a 1GB floppy drive (at the time HDDs were in the low single GB range). It was expensive (as was the media) and was completely beaten by CDRs a few years later. However from what I understand it was much much faster and more reliable than their Zip drives.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I've been searching for a backup solution like this. I read about this earlier today and immediately thought, "Woah. This will solve my backup problem." Then I looked at the price and realized I could get a USB 2.0 or firewire hard drive for a LOT less money and have a LOT more storage.
If it's compatible Linux, I'll certainly reconsider when/if the price comes down.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
when removable hard drives are so cheap, and enterprise systems are already invested in tape drives, I see no market niche for this.
Plus, 35 gig disks at $60 a pop?
mom and dad aren't going to want to pay $180, plus $400 drive cost, to back up their 120gb hard drive they got in their computer.
good luck iomega.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
With the internal ATAPI drive as a bootable partition, it seems you could get very good security by keeping everything ( OS, swap area, et. al. ) on removable media. Lock up disk in safe when not in use, so even malicious access to hardware becomes more difficult.
A Human Right
Well, if it is truly the "son of Jaz," then it looks like is should probably run under Linux.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I really think one would have to be insane to trust an Iomega product with 35GB worth of data. I've had a Zip drive die on me from the infamous "click of death" losing 250MB worth of data in the process, and that was pretty disappointing.
Now compare this to losing an $400 dollar drive along with an $60 disc full of 35GB worth of data, which could potentially be expected from this product if one were to pay attention to Iomega's history. I'd probably end up going on a rampage.
No, he just carried over the mistake from the Register, from whence he plagiarized the article.
With a pen drive, you don't need a driver, don't need cables and just connect it to anything running Windows 98 or above with a USB port. (not sure about Linux or Apple). I have a 64mb one I use everywhere all the time, at work, home, at Kinkos. It is the best storage medium I've ever used.
The price to get really decent storage is still too high, but drops exponentially every couple of months.
Even if Iomega sells these drives (they might), there's no way they can compete with the Chinese companies which don't have the huge infrastructure, thousands of employees, marketing costs, etc.
What is that big "sideways capital I" shaped bulge on the top of the unit? Some sort of sound damping layer so you can't hear any clicks?
If "Son of Jaz" is pitched as a backup media, why wouldn't you go with a blue laser dvd? Media costs will surely be lower.
The more relevant factor than the cost of the device itself is probably the cost of the backup media. I know up until recently tape was the most cost effective media for data backup. If the the Son of Jaz disks are cheaper per megabyte and are just as reliable then I would consider buying one of those.
Who needs to store stuff on a dinky 35 GB Jaz drive when you can use a seperate hard drive or cheap storage server with inexpensive 300 GB drives readily available! When you factor in software RAID, it's just ridiculous to imaging flipping in and out 35 GB disks. Iomega should just give up in the storage arena.
Communism was just a red herring.
After six Zip drives, and more than 50 zip disks destroyed by the "Click of Death", excuse me for not trusting Iomega with my data anymore.
What really got me, was the complete disregard Iomega showed to its custumers with the Click of Death incident.
I saw several thousands of dollars worth of Iomega hardware/disks turn to crap thanks to that clicky sound, and that is without counting the data itself or the time spent dealing with recovering said data.
Sorry Iomega, you are not a trusted brand in storage media anymore.
adl
My boring ramblings
It wasn't just how bad the product turned out to be - it was Iomega's failure to support the product. Double Plus Ungood.
For instance:
* reintroduce the Disc2@ CD burn labelling that was in Yamaha Drives
* find a way like Plextor has to burn even MORE data to standard CDRs
* increase DVD-/+R writing speeds with blue lasers & be the fi1st to market & make deals w/ companies like Apple
* design CD burners that label & burn all in 1 drive - small dye sub printers COULD EASILY FIT in a 5.25" drive bay
* sell integrated media readers into CDRW/DVDR drives or what about w/ front facing firewire and USB ports
* reintroduce the Nakamichi jukebox 5.25" 5 disc drive!
* Something
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I have a cusomer that purchased a case of 200MB ATA hard drives instead of using tape. Incremental and transaction backups are mirrored.
Interesting solution, seems you'd want something more permenant for archival backups though.
-- $G
I wasn't a victim of the "click of death" drives, but I did buy a CDRW drive with their name on it. The drive had problems from day one and "technical support: would never acknowledge them. I only found out much later that the drive was a repackaged drive from another manufacturer, and that manufacturer had firmware updates out for a long time that fixed their version of the drive (but would not apply to the drive that identified itself as an Iomega drive). Iomega would never bother to supply a firmware update for the version they released or even acknowledge the problem.
In addition to this and tons of other horror stories of support issues, a problem I see with Iomega products is that the media is never cost effective. You could likely buy hard drives with more capacity than you could but just media for this new Iomega junk. And you could buy an IDE removable drive tray for a heck of a lot less than you can buy this drive for, even with several extra trays. If you go with the hard drive tray approach, hard drives for it will keep coming down in price and offer greater capacity; if you go with the Iomega solution the capacity will never increase over the 35 gigs and media will never come down in price.
Sure, there are some people (I even know a couple) who are dumb enough to put a zip drive in a computer that already has a CDRW drive in it and feed the zip drive. But there is simply no good reason to buy this or many other overpriced, underperforming Iomega products.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That's failures versus time. Initially you have a high failure rate due to defects, then a long floor with few failures, then a ramping failure rate due to the product wearing out.
MTBF measures the rate of failures during the long floor period, and ignores initial defect failures and things wearing out. So you just get a bunch of good products running, wait until a few of them fail, then calculate the MTBF as ((amount of time) * (number of units running in parallel) / (number of failures)). 35 years is about 300,000 hours, or roughly equivalent to running 2,000 devices for a week and experiencing one failure.
That's also why MTBF is a shitty way of determining lifespan; most devices wear out way before the are expected to fail according to MTBF.
---
Find out more about the impending downfall o
about 35gb of data on a CDR? ...
Yea, that's why they're not in direct competition, because they are targetted at different markets. CDRs aren't a serious backup technology for companies.
In terms of backups and dead storage, it's nice to see something that's not a tape drive. Tapes are expensive and very linear -- restoring anything from tape sucks ass. You have to unspool and respool the entire thing to get at the data.
It doesn't matter if people WANT their proprietary standard, because PEOPLE aren't the target audience.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
... lies in fitting a "2.5in removable disk" in a "1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge".
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
That's comparing Iomega's new product with Sony's obsolete one. Try comparing to AIT-2 or AIT-3, let alone LTO or LTO-2. 100GB LTO tapes can be had for around $60-80, IIRC. That's less than $1/GB. LTO-2 is 200GB uncompressed for a bit over $100 a tape. Drives are expensive as hell, but most of the cost for a backup system ends up being media anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer for a company that sells enterprise storage. We sell tape all the time. Disk is fast, but not portable. Optical (including CD, DVD) is slow and WAY too small for business backups. Tape is getting larger and faster all the time. LTO-3 is rumored to break the Terabyte per tape mark when it comes out. (Compressed, of course)
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
I bulk buy my blank CDs and DVDs by the hundred. I've just re-stocked. The way I see it, this is enough blank media to last me untill I die (or untill CDs / DVDs become obsolete, whichever is the soonest). I cannot imagine what anybody would do with these 35Gb carts, when they cost so much more than any other kind of media I know.
Okay, expensive, and no one needs this stuff anymore. Why do they bother? $60/disk? $400 for the unit? I don't understand where and why there was funding.
The first post in this thread, though modded as flame-bait, is exactly how the majority of previous Iomega purchasers feel.
The Zip Drive was a nice... novelty. I never purchased one as I thought the media was too slow and too overpriced. It was also introduced just as CD burners were becoming mainstream, and there's no doubt who won that war. A CD golds 6-7 times more data than a zip disk, is drastically cheaper than the aforementioned zip disk, and every computer can use the media (unlike said zip disk)!
No... The zip drive never got my money. I was instead suckered into the whole Jaz drive debacle.
Without reiterating what all of us suckers now know, the Jaz drive was the biggest most over-priced piece of shit ever!
And that in itself might have been ok had Iomega came forward, stepped up to the plate and said "We had some quality control issues. We've corrected these, and have trashed all the affected units. In addition, those who have purchased said drives can now exchange them at their nearest retailer for an updated version at no cost".
They had such an opportunity to make a great customer servicing impression on all of us poor mistreated buyers, but they didn't. Instead they offered rude customer service reps who prefered to blame the user for the problems as opposed to admitting to them themselves.
Then they offered solutions that didn't fix anything, and cost the user more money - "Well... You can send the unit back to us at your cost, and we'll look at it. If we find anything wrong, we'll replace it with a remanufactured unit" (That will likely also have the same "click of death" problem you're currently experiencing).
Does anyone remember the eventual outcome of this? All of us who got suckered into the Jaz drive were eventually allowed to return our damaged goods for credit towards another Iomega purchase.
That was their answer after a couple of years of harrasment and threatened law suits.
So no Iomega, I'm not interested in another of your products, no matter how good it sounds.
And isn't it interesting how the 'Son of Jaz' comes out just as dual sided DVD's and such as now coming into the consumer arena!
It'll be almost an instant replay of the CD/Original Jaz drive fight, and I'll bet money on the fact that in a few years or so, you'll have an entirely new generation of people complaining about Iomegas quality and customer service. Not to mention whining about how they wish they'd have waitied for the higher density DVD burners to become more mainstream.
Iomega is forever synonymous(SP?) with "Bad" and "Waste of money" in my book now. And you?
It's been reported in the OEM market that Iomega has not only replaced, but upgraded the famous Zip Click-Of-Death(TM?) for their new Son of Jaz model. It seems that when my SoJ disks start to fail, the device will begin playing soulful tunes from the always enjoyable John Coltrane.
Iomega may not understand market pricing, quality assurance or customer service. It's good to know that they have figured out something that their customers have known for a while now - when you lose data, soothing music helps ease the pain!
Well, these days anyway. If you're using a 35-40Gb tape you're using *old* technology.
Current tape drives are:
200Gb (400gb compressed) 35MB/s (70MB/s) LTO 2.
300Gb (900Gb compressed) 40MB/s (120MB/s) IBM 3592.
300gb (600Gb compressed) 36MB/s (72MB/s) SDLT.
500Gb (1.3Tb compressed) 30MB/s (78MB/s) SuperAIT.
If you're backing systems up, tape begins making economic sense when your backups start getting past 100Gb or so. Below that level you might as well use removable hard disks + hotplug bay.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Anyone remember their video capture gizmo, the Iomega Buz?
I bought one about 2 months before they totally scrapped that pile of junk, with absolutely no driver updates/support whatsoever.
Oh, yeah, I also had to send every Zip drive our company ever purchased to an early grave. The Jaz was the only thing they ever made that I actually got really solid use out of.
Buyer beware.
"Follow your Bliss." -- Joseph Campbell
reading through iomega's site, it seems that the class action lawsuit about the Click of Death came to a conclusion. It covers items purchased between 1995 and 2001.
Do recent Zip drives still exhibit this behavior? I just bought the USB version last week, and havn't used it yet. Now i'm wondering if i should just return it immediately.
Does anyone have any recent information?
Iomega's REV FAQ says the cartridges are 77m x 75mm x 10mm (i.e. 7.7cm x 7.5 cm x 1 cm), at a weight of 73g.
FAQ is available here.
The Register claims:
Iomega claims:
I own both 250MB Zip and 1GB Jaz products.
When it comes to the Jaz products, I guess I've been lucky; I never had any of the carts fail. The worst I can say about Jaz is that it was expensive as anything and today has almost no eBay value at all given the low cost of writable CD and DVD products. (Yes, I realize this could have happened with any product or technology, but it's still irritating as anything.)
What really burned me was the way I was treated when I called Iomega with regards to a dead FireWire adapter that clipped onto the back of a first generation 250MB Zip drive. I sought replacement or repair but was curtly told, "Buy another one." So much for the warranty, which had about three weeks remaining.
Given how everything of theirs I own has lost so much of its value, along with the lousy treatment I received from their support staff, it's been an easy decision to make: I'll never, ever purchase an Iomega product again.
Just my two currency units...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Wading through all these "But this sucks compared to tape!" comments made me think back on some of the late great backup media I've used..
IBM line printer; Dump the program to the printer in case the machine was powercycled.
Sony Walkman and a Dictaphone microcassette recorder with a cable between them
Notching my single sided game discs and copying other games on the back
Seagate 5mb full height tape drive, only took 6 hours a tape!
KERMIT to a Unix shell account at 1200 baud
Seagate 20mb tape drive, half height this time. Still six hours a tape, but you couldn't back up at night because the sucker made too much noise to sleep in the next room.
Software RAID of SCSI CDROM drives; took five hours to burn all 8 discs, but 5.6Gb of storage for about $4 in media ruled.
Cheesy off-brand 8Gb tape drive.. Two hours a tape was great!
Software mirroring in NT; No backup time, but for some queer reason 5% of the time you switched to the "mirror" it was missing data.
I'm currently on the "lending library" system of backups.. I burn a copy of everything as soon as I get it, end up loaning it to someone, and then have to call them and beg them for my discs back..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Its to survive a disk failure.
"Oh crap. This got all messed up. I need to restore $THIS_DIRECTORY to what we had a month ago...
And pull the copy from 6 months ago too, just so I can check it. Thanks, mr admin."
No, if this can be used (USB good) to backup the Very Large Drives of my relatives and friends who Just Don't Know Better, then great.
DVD @ 25GB (the bluelaser one) or multi-layer (50GB) has been promised and we're still waiting.
At least this is here.
So when to I get the 5.25" TB one?
... except in whatever use, something else is cheaper and better.
... maybe you own a small server centre and want to offer backup to your clients. You can have one USB version of this drive and swap cartridges as you plug it into each server and backup. Of course you will have to manage the servers yourself as most servers won't have a nice accessible button to use on the front to activate a backup application automatically...
At home - CDRs or DVDRs are a lot cheaper and the drives are a fraction of the cost. The average user doesn't have that great a need to backup a lot of stuff anyway, or have a need for 25MB/s backup. Anyway, at $60 a go, you won't use these for archival purposes anyway. For a floppy disk replacement it would be nice though, although what need does the average person have for floppies that can't be addressed by a CDRW or DVDRW, a network or USB flash media?
So
If Iomega want to get this format accepted even a little bit, they need to open up the specification (maybe at a reasonable charge) to other companies to make drives and media. Optical writable media succeeded because it was a standard. One company cannot create a standard on its own.
Anyone else annoyed at the increasing number of plagerised register articles are cropping up on slashdot. Shouldn't the editors check things like this? Mind you they dont check spelling, or links...
Ahh, but RAID can be a backup!
If you have 100 GB of data to backup, why not just build a few RAIDs to store your backups to? I will contend that tape drives still beat this method out, but extra RAIDs are getting cheaper by the day.
Even hand-built arrays of 2x200 GB are good to store 200 GB worth of incrementals, while a bigger array could store your full-systems.
We're finally in an age where terrabytes of disk space can be had for only a few thousand dollars. If that happens to be a full factor or 2 more than you need, you can start to use it to back itself up.
Just be careful to not put all your faith in one big RAID array, rebuilding disks in a 4x200 GB striped+mirrored takes a damn long time.
"Each disk contains its own read/write head assembly and drive motor, allowing the unit to be sealed as tightly as a regular hard drive."
and
"The drives cost $400 for an external USB 2.0 unit and $380 for an internal ATAPI drive. Both ship with a bundled disk."
So basically what they have done is created a high capacity, low-error inexpensive removable disk, and a $400 USB connector. I think I'll put this item right to the top of my forget-about-immediately list.
The cartridges may last for 30 years, but they're not likely to be producing compatible drives in FIVE years. Just my hunch!
>Sorry, I call bullshit. Long distance from Canada to the US did not cost 66 cents a minute in the time frame you're talking about, the mid-nineties. Or if it did, you're a total fucking idiot for not switching LD carriers.
Sorry, you're wrong.
Look! I just provided the same amount of evidence as you did! WOOTY WOOT WOOT!
Retard, provide some links or STFU.
I have a small business I help out with backing up of about 6gb of data now.
Their 2 year old Segate IDE travan drive and it's 50$ a tape counterparts is beggining to pack up (I don't miss it)
I've proposed to them this (I wish it came to me, but I found it in a newsgroup post)
5x30gb 2.5" IDE drives - 100$
1 USB 2.0 PCI card - 15$
5 2.5" IDE enclosures (preferably well ventilated ones with the nice rubber stoppers on each corner)
This solution will work with backup exec 9 (sorry MS man here, due to lack of linux knowledge) - but being a fully "mounted" (? right word) active disk after Win2k server detects it - you can pretty much backup with any method you like.
And it's faster than tape.
And there's a warranty on the media (hard disks)
And it's now cheaper
And I get more storage.
It won't be long before someone invents / builds a small box about 150mm x 150mm x 150mm with 3 2.5" raid'd disks in it ready to go as a backup solution with software and controller, about the only issue is if someone knocks the thing off.
I really look forward to installing this for this company - it will save me a hell of a lot of worries.
They will charge 10x the cost per byte of every other possible solution. ZIP disks were obsolete 6 years ago as far as I was concerned, since CD-R or CD-RW stored more for a tiny fraction of the cost per byte and were more reliable and nearly as fast. If ZIP's had been priced at a dollar a piece in 1996, or Jaz's at $20 a piece, they would own the removeable magnetic media market today, but they have always arrogantly refused to lower their prices, dooming their products, good or bad, to oblivion. I used a Jaz drive for a couple of years to take data back and forth to work every day, but it soon became far easier and essentially cheaper to stick a harddrive in a removeable chassis. I've never considered IOmega products since. They were outrageously expensive and less useable compared all the alternatives.
Around 1994, I remember picking up a 340MB hard drive from MicroCenter or CompUSA (maybe they were SoftwareHouse back then) during their Buck-a-Meg sale. 10 years later the typical harddrive costs less than a dollar a gig, but Zip disks are still roughly the same price (with a factor of 1.5 or 2). Who needs 'em? For portable storage, I have a 256MB SD card in a little USB widgie that fits in my pocket and set me back about $70 total, and I don't need a friggin' drive to read the media. I can use any USB-equipped machine or my PocketPC.
This product could be really good, but if the media cost more than a dollar a gig, I can't imagine ever buying it. And with the drive at MSRP'ing at $400 or so, even that wouldn't cut it. I'd just as soon buy a stack of DVD-R's and another 250GB drive.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
For home and small business use the volume shadow copy repository in Windows 2003 or a similar setup under Linux would be fine. Combined with RAID-1 or better RAID-5 it eleminates probably 95+% of need for removable media for backup. I personally still use an IDE sled for occasional home backups but they aren't really necessary since I installed 2003 (I'm an MCSE so the $ was well spent as a learning tool, I've also set up a similar concept under Linux). Hopefully XP-Reloaded will also include the volume shadow copy feature or something similar.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not only that, but your numbers are probably on the conservative side, I think you can buy bulk 170 GB hard drives for around $100, which means (using your inexpensive $45 shell) for a net of $145 we can get an equivalent speed drive (actually the drive speed isn't usually that critical, the bus often can't even reach the maximum sped most drives can handle) which is 5 times the size of Iomega's drive for less than 1/3 the price.
This reminds me of a story about DEC's disk drives. Don't know if it's true but I'll pass it along.
Back in the 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation ("DEC") sold minicomputers such as the PDP-11 and mainframes such as the Decsystem 20. DEC also sold a high capacity disk drive which was about the size of a washing machine, had a capacity of 100 megabytes, and cost US $27,000.00. You could buy an equivalent drive from what was then hands down the best maker of the finest quality hard drives, Control Data Corporation ("CDC"), for about $7,000, but you also had to buy a controller card for about $300.00 because the DEC drives used a really stupid controller card and put all the smarts into the disc drive. CDC put very little intelligence in the drive and used the controller to handle it.
Okay, no problem, basically I remember people would say that they would love to be an all DEC shop but they couldn't afford it because DEC's prices were so high. DEC often pointed out that their equipment was of high quality and high reliability and that was why it was expensive.
On that point, DEC was absolutely correct, and here's the story: apparently someone owned both one of DEC's drives and a CDC drive, and opened both of them up to take a look inside them.
What they discovered was that the DEC drive was basically the additional circuitry not on its controller card, wired to... the very same CDC hard drive! DEC was essentially charging a 300% markup for a rebadged CDC drive!
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
your post could have only been better had you started it with "Pop quiz, hotshot..."
Thank-you, goodnight.