The People's Republic sends you its regards.
Posted on 05/10/2008 6:02:08 AM PDT by shove_it
The People's Republic sends you its regards.
What year was the shuttle built? Many military computers run old operating systems on old hardware. The Computer in the AWACs dates back to the mid '70s, but has been upgraded once since then, although it's still the same basic design. It's called the IBM 4PI, because architecturally, it's like two IBM 360s. The crews call it their "steam powered computer."
Which, IIRC, are variants of the same IBM 4PI computers used earlier on the Saturn and which were also adopted by the AWACS about the same time as they were adopted for the Shuttle. The Shuttle does have 4 of them, operating in a quad redundant configuration, at least for flight control. The 4PI is really a miniaturized (not that much) version of the old 360 mainframe, although with dual processors. (2PI radians == 360 degrees, thus two 360s is 4PI).
That might not be as effective as just writing over all the data multiple times, at least three times. Better yet, first do the write over, then the magnet.
I used to worry about running out of work as a software engineer... but with government systems like this still running there should be a never ending supply of re-writes.
“As I’m planning to buy some back-up drives and all I get is double-talk “
Not sure that it matters today. I worked for HP’s disk drive division for many years before I retired. I don’t think this one was an HP design but it doesn’t matter at this point. All of the patents are shared between major manufactures. And HP is no longer in the disk mech business... They had superior quality, but couldn’t compete on the price.
What is that lab in Colorado then.
That NASA 340MB drive was made by IBM, which is no longer in disk drive manufacturing business - they sold it years ago to HDS / Hitachi Data Systems - though they still do great research in magnetic (specifically, vertical), optical and hybrid storage and memory, particularly in density area.
As I'm planning to buy some back-up drives and all I get is double-talk on which are the best/most-durable.
Most media / drive platters are made by third parties and used interchangeably by most remaining drive manufacturers. Depending on size of the drive (3.5", 2.5", 1.8") you will not go wrong buying either Seagate / Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi / IBM or Fujitsu. The differences for the most part are insignificant unless you really know what specifically you are looking for that another brand drive doesn't have at the moment. If your computer has SATA interface, I would suggest going with SATA drives.
Unless you need great speed (unlikely for purpose of backup) I would recommend staying with 7200 RPM drive instead of 10K or 15K RPM enterprise / multimedia drives due to lower heat and higher media reliability. Ignore all manufacturers MTBF claims, warranty duration is far more important. Smaller sizes or removables have other, lesser known names which sometimes are only branded differently. I would generally stay away from those unless you know the company / brand and have specific reasons, other than price, to use them.
Hope it helped.
HP, just like IBM continues extensive research into storage and memory, though they no longer sell HP-branded drives - even after they stopped manufacturing their own disk drives they resold Quantum’s drives under HP brand until Quantum’s disk division merger with Maxtor which was recently bought by Seagate.
As an example of their storage / memory research look up “memristor” - an entirely new memory storage, based on 30 year old concept, made possible by advances in nanotechnology.
Thanks for the heads up on “memristor”. Interesting deice... Imagine the problems “backing up” that kind of machine?
Of course other cool ideas have came out of HP-Labs that sounded exciting and yet fizzled. Remember the bubble memory. It was going to change the world... but it didn’t. Though I had an opportunity to play with it on a project in the lab.
Re "backing up" memristor, indeed it would be interesting challenge. I assume it would be done with much faster carrier/transport technology, something optical / photonic / quantum or something as "mundane" as T-Rays once they tame electromagnetic Terahertz Radion - University of Utah waveguides bridge 'terahertz gap'
Science and scientists mostly renew my faith in humanity, while politics and politicians usually keep ruthlessly removing it.
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