End Days for Antique Disk Drives
January 7, 2015
HP 3000 servers which use drives made a decade ago are still running. It's not so far back, from a support perspective. Hewlett-Packard was supporting 9-GB and 18-GB units through 2008, and the 36-GB model A5595A through 2009. Those are the end of support dates from the manufacturer. Independent support companies back those models today.
They do it by replacing devices when they fail, not servicing dead drives. Any 3000s still operating off decade-old storage units are into magic time: those end days when it's a marvel just to see something that old still crucial to a system. Hard disks are the only moving parts of a 3000, after all. Even the redundant ones will fail, since all drives do.
The 3000 community has been facing its aging hardware a very long time. People were checking during 2006 on those end of support dates for the 3000's most common boot drives. A call for sensibility at the time went out from Donna Hofmeister.
It's more than time for many MPE shops to "smell the coffee," or perhaps more accurately, smell the looming disaster. If your disc drive is less than 36GB, odds are it's ready to be replaced. It's past it's expected life span, and you're living on borrowed time. If you got any plans to keep on running these systems, it's more than time to get onto new drives. With how prices have dropped, it's hard to not justify going to new drives.
Hofmeister added "I wouldn't want to have to explain why, following a disc failure, you can't get your MPE system running again." Replacing these wee discs with newer technology is possible, of course. Little SCSI drives that can be seen by MPE are harder to find by now, though. HP's last significant extension of MPE was to expand the server's vision of storage units, so the 3000 could see devices up to 500GB. But half a terabyte is a small drive today.
Finding an AutoRAID 12H replacement gets tougher still. Not tough to locate. Tough to justify.
Homesteading shops might not need a lot of time, of course. If they're heading to a migration solution, that overtime might be as short as several months. Here in the early days of 2015, the ecommerce retailers are finally un-freezing systems for makeovers. It's beyond the spending holidays now. They can make changes to their systems, including replacing them altogether.
One way to skip over the end days for these drives is to make a transition to emulated 3000s. That's a homesteading solution with a real strategy. New Intel hardware, current-era storage. The hardware support might even be worked into existing PC-style enterprise hardware agreements. There would be nothing to explain if that generation of hardware failed.
A drive built a decade ago would provide another kind of story to tell.