You can fit 8x9Gb low profile drives into a Jamaica unit for a total of
72Gb.  I have had three of these fully populated Jamaica units in production
for 3-4 months and have not experienced any problems.

Tom Genute

                -----Original Message-----
                From:   Patrick Santucci
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
                Sent:   Thursday, January 14, 1999 4:04 PM
                To:     [log in to unmask]
                Subject:        Re: 9 gig drives

                Donna Garverick wrote:

                > a jamaica fully-populated with 9gb drives
                > gives ~36gb of total storage.  to fill the enclosure with
4.3gb drives yields
                > ~34gb -- a very small difference.

                We have lots of the 4GB drives (which HP insists on
labelling 4.3GB) in
                Jamica boxes, and just got our first set of 9 GB drives.
Guess what?
                Their half-height, same size as the 4GB, so "fully
populated" now means
                you could put 8 of 'em in a Jamaica box and have a whopping
72GB of
                disc...

                Except, from what I can see, the 9GB drives (labelled 9.1
GB) are really
                only 8.48 GB. This means a fully populated Jamaica box with
8 "9.1"GB
                drives would yield 67.84 GB of disk space. At least, by my
calculations:

                At 256 bytes per sector, 4 sectors = 1024 bytes or 1k

                35566208 sectors /    4 = 8891552.00 KB
                   8891552.00 KB / 1024 =    8683.16 MB
                      8683.16 MB / 1024 =       8.48 GB
                therefore:
                         8.48 GB x    8 =      67.84 GB

                Using this same formula (16776624 sectors/4/1024/1024) the
4.3 GB disks
                come out to 4.00 GB. So a Jamaica box fully populated with
these babies
                gives you 32.00 GB, not 34.

                <second-guess mode>
                Or am I doing something wrong?  2^10 = 1024 or 1KB, right?
And (2^10)^2
                = 1048576 or 1 MB, which is the same as 1024^2, right?
Please correct me
                if I'm wrong on the math! (I won't take it personally; I'll
blame Excel.
                :-)
                </second-guess mode>

                Patrick
                --
                Patrick Santucci
                Technical Services Systems Programmer
                KVI, a division of Seabury & Smith, Inc.
                Visit our site! http://www.kvi-ins.com
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