TechAmok

admin · Site Admin Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 773

It's amazing how quickly technology advances these days...

russellg81 · Contributor Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 11

Wow..

Conz0r · Guest

richace · Guest

I'm prior Navy and this big piece of "junk" is the guts of a UYH-3 disk drive built by (I think) Univac. That rust colored round disk inside the casing consists of 5 plates (think todays disk drive super sized) and is removable. That way you can swap the program by swapping disks. It's over 40 years old and we still use these on some of our Naval ships. They (Navy) have replaced most but are still in the process of replacing them with newer disk drives that take up considerably less space and are easier to maintain and operate. And yes, it's very expensive to purchase and maintain.

puseya · Guest

That is the hda assembly from an IBM 3380 disk drive circa late 80's early 90's. There were two in each cabinet and each hda had two heads (the lumps sticking out of each side). Each disk was approx 1.2Gb in size.

Unfortunately I can't remember if it is a fba or a count key device. I think it is count key and some of the earlier ones were fba.

I started work on IBM mainframes and had the pleasure of helping change them every now and then. The cabinet for this was the size of a large fridge and the controller for a string of these was of a similar size and still had a hard wire board where you could move the wires to change some of the functions.

These disks had another trick, there was blank space between the tracks that could be used to store data if the original track became unusable. I actually did the course on the disk maintenance utility for these and learnt hot to cause a predefined series of error by moving a wire on a hard wired controller card.

In their time they were blindingly fast. just imagine was sort of seek speeds you could get with two heads.

The biggest laugh is that IBM supplied a special key for these, it is basically an allen key with a proper key body. I still have mine from years ago and it is my lucky charm.

Now is you had a picture of an IBM 3330 or earlier then that would be a better example of low density storage. If you really wanted to be sick have a look for an old IBM core drum.