IBM 3380 disk drives / info?

From: Curt Vendel <curt_at_atari-history.com>
Date: Mon Mar 19 13:44:09 2001

I've got one better, do you remember the old Bernuolli removable disk drives,
the original big beasts in IBM PC/XT cases??? Well, there used to be a
serious problem with their power supplies, you would be working in a lab and all
of a sudden you'd hear this loud thunderous "thump" type explosion and out from
the box would pour out this white nasty ozone'ish smoke. After nervously
pulling the plug, you would slide off the cover to find one of the coke-can
sized cap's had completely blown off the top and if you looked at the inside of
the top cover there would be this spectacular meteor-crater shaped carbon mark
where the capacitor had blown upward and scorched the inside of the case.
Now thats quality assurance!!! :-)




Billy D'Augustine wrote:

> I worked in a mainframe shop that replaced their removable media with fixed
> drives. One of the stories was how, one day, after they loaded the removable
> media, the heads crashed. The guy said it was the neatest thing to actually
> watch - the covers were smoked plastic, some sort of noise, then the covers
> were suddenly white.
>
> >
> > I have a 3380 HDA I saved from my mainframe days...had a MAJOR
> > headcrash....when I opened up the top to look, the
> > head that crashed was vaporized!
> >
Received on Mon Mar 19 2001 - 13:44:09 GMT