VAX wanted in Bristol, UK

From: Messick, Gary <Gary.Messick_at_itt.com>
Date: Tue Dec 10 07:21:00 2002

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carlos Murillo [mailto:carlos_murillo_at_epm.net.co]
> Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 11:49 PM
> To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: VAX wanted in Bristol, UK
>
>
> At 01:30 PM 12/9/02 -0800, you wrote:
> >On Erebus, they use pressurized drive canisters for external
> SCSI drives.
> >At Pole, they don't do anything special. Drives die all the
> time. To
> >add insult to injury, massively dry air holds a lot less
> heat than the
> >air you and I are breathing right now - computers and hard
> disks frequently
> >die from overheating at the South Pole - the air is thinner and drier
> >and can't conduct as much heat away from CPUs and drives.
>
> Quite frankly, to have a system die of heat exhaustion _there_ seems
> ludicrous. As long as the assembly can withstand a steep temperature
> gradient, there's lots of cooling available, with temperature low
> enough to compensate for the decrease in specific heat many times,
> right?
>
> carlos.
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
>

Actually, having flown a high altitude ballon experiment over Antarctica,
it's the combination or less air to
conduct heat away from the source (A VERY big problem at 100K ft.), combined
with the intesity of the radiation
from the sun (being filtered by less atmosphere as Ethan states) and the
reflection from the ice.

Our expeiment actually used nitrogen pressurized chambers with a optical
WORM drive. It turned out we could
pressurize the chanbers to about 1.75 atmospheres, then the optical drives
would crap out. We suspected the
pressure somehow deformed the lenses in the laser system.

(aside)
The optical drives were manufactured by a company called Cherokee systems in
CO. They purportedly militarized
the drives for aircraft, and could withstand low pressure. When the drives
first arrived, after unpacking, we
opened one of the drive doors, and a 2 inch moth flew out. After having
some porblems, we call support, and
mentioned the bug to them, and they responded, "Yeah, we're having a very
bad year with the mothes this year!"
I should have know then how buggy the drives system was going to be!

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Received on Tue Dec 10 2002 - 07:21:00 GMT