Thanks for the memory.

With these new 32Gb microSD cards being released:

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This picture is a bit of a mind blower:

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Cheers Don...

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Don McKenzie

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Don McKenzie
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LOL

Are any of these IBM 3380 units still functional ?

How long with the data last on the Sandisk device ??

hamilton

Reply to
hamilton

I built IBM mainframes in the late 70's. The biggest machines had a maximum of 16MB of memory made from 2kb SRAM dies 4 to a package. A lot of machines shipped with only 2MB.

Reply to
nospam

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I very much doubt it, most of the original A and B models were pulled in the late 80's for taking up too much floor space. A few D models and the triple density K models hung on until the mid 90's, but, by that time, they were so unreliable that they were replaced by modern units based on commodity drives.

The 3380 was an obsolete heap of brown smelly stuff the day it was released, it had 14" platters mounted like a sawmill driven by a 1 horse motor through a flat rubber belt. A single HDA (head disk assembly) had

2 sets of heads in the one plastic box along with the platters. There were 2 such units in one cab sharing one blower system which pumped large quantities of air through an absolute filter to the HDAs. This meant that, if you had to replace an HDA, you had to take 4 drives offline and lost the data on 2 of them. Changing an HDA was a 1 to 2 hour job, more if it was a bad head crash, and the air system was contaminated. Meanwhile, the Japanese were producing compatible machines with 4 sealed drives, much more reliable, and the HDA could be changed in a matter of minutes if needed and only affected one drive.

At one large site in Sydney, we replaced over 100 3380s with 2 EMC boxes in the mid 90s changing 2 very large rooms from hot crowded noisy places to large empty cool quiet places.

I suspect that a few years of working on the danm things has done my hearing no good at all. In my experience, IBM has never produced a good state of the art storage system, as they say, Inferior But Marketable.

Reply to
keithr

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