Bakul Shah wrote:
*snip*
This is a good idea. We did this in 1983, back when disks
were simpler beasts. No RAID then of course.
Sure there were. From SMD days in the '70's, even.
We called them 'mirrored' (2 drives, one controller and cable set)
or 'duplexed' (separate controllers and cables) - sometimes on separate hosts
sharing common drives.
The other so-called 'level's and 'RAID' terminology took longer to catch on. Or
become affordable enough to leave the mainframe arena anyway.
Drives - such as the ISS-80 - a few of whose remains litter my garage yet today,
were hardly 'simpler'.
Quite the reverse! Built like a milling machine or Hardinge lathe to even
*attempt* to keep heads aligned with (replaceable) media.
"Simplicity" - or decent and affordable reliability at least - arrived with
IBM-UK 'Winchester' technology and the CDC-'birdnames' notably Lark and Wren.
Even with 'Winchester', 'Bernoulli' 8" cartidges were far more reliable than the
comparable 'SeaGRRRRRATE' HDD of the same era. Twinned units were not 'RAID' but
had a fast 'dd'-like imaging utility for manual duplication.
Seagate 5 1/4" drives used to be good for 3 to 6 months, Western Digital or
Microscience 6 to 12, CDC 12 to 24 months.
Big improvement as first-generation NCR' Century' series once lunched a set of
platters as often as twice a week...
The reasons Fossil and Venti are as they are may no longer be as obvious or
compelling as they once were, but how soon we forget how *seriously* fragile and
failure-prone HDD once were.
Bill
