[cctalk] Re: Disk-pack-based drives at LCM

I can't say I blame them.  It was a lot of work to get a drive running after a head crash.  If it was a bad crash, there >could be extensive cleaning to be done followed by replacing one or more heads.  Then the new heads had to be >aligned.  If you hadn't cleaned thoroughly enough, you risked damaging the expensive alignment disk. Once I came back from lunch to see the operators had 3 drives open.  They kept swapping a disk pack which was >giving I/O errors to new drives and were crashing heads along the way due to the damaged disk pack.  I stopped >them before they spun up the pack on a 4th drive.  That wasn't as bad as the time one of them dropped a disk pack >and bent platters.  That ripped heads completely out of the mounting mechanism. Ah, the good old days! Rod

On Jun 2, 2023, at 2:51 AM, P Gebhardt via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: Hi all, I just came across pictures on the LCM website about their SDS Sigma installation there. On the pictures, one can see 10-platter disk packs in the corner and stored on the disk drives. Did the LCM ever had these in operation, either for data retrieval or even demo purposes? I know of the Jim Austin Computer museum where they fixed a CDC 9766 drive but it suffered a head crash after a few hours according to their description which led to giving up the operation of these drives. Greetings, Pierre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.digitalheritage.de