We have hardware mirroring (Nike drives) on our 9000 and haven't had a bit
of trouble.  We lost one drive and one fan in the last two years and
replaced them without any interuption in production.

We are planning to eventually convert our primary MPE system with all the
Jamaica drives to Unix at some point in the far off future and were warned
by our PSS tech that Unix software mirroring is quite a performance hit.
(But, he is pretty biased against the 9000's.)

Kara Strunk
[log in to unmask]
Data Systems Manager
Maritz Marketing Research Inc.

                -----Original Message-----
                From:   Mark Bixby [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
                Sent:   Wednesday, January 20, 1999 11:46 AM
                To:     [log in to unmask]
                Subject:        Re: 9 GIG Jamaica Drives

                Patrick Santucci writes:
                >
                > Kara Strunk a.k.a. MMRI CS ListServ wrote:
                >
                > > We lost another 9 gig Jamaica drive this morning.  That
makes 6 drives that
                > > we've had to replace since August when we installed the
cabinets with 32
                > > drives.  Not a great track record!  Thankfully, the
mirror kicked in and
                > > production was unaffected this time.
                >
                > Kara, are you using full-height 4-to-a-box or half-height
8-to-a-box 9GB
                > drives in your Jamaicas? And what model of system, OS rev,
Mirror/iX
                > version, etc. are you running? Just trying to pinpoint if
this is a
                > hardware, I/O bottleneck, software/subsys, or OS problem.
                >
                > I'm desparately curious because it looks like we may be
going the way of
                > the 9GB drives very soon!

                OK, OK, all this talk has now got me curious too.

                Our big new 9000/V2250 is supposed to be delivered next
month, and guess what,
                it will contain 3 Jamaica enclosures fully populated with
half-height 9GB
                drives running MirrorDisk/UX on HPUX 11.0.

                If anybody is seeing these 9GB failures on 9000 machines,
please chime in.
                Thanks.
                --
                Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
                Coast Community College Dist.   Web:
http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
                District Information Services   1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa,
CA, USA 92626-5429
                Technical Support               Voice: +1 714 438-4647
                "You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." -
tunefs(1M)