Re: 6618 drives for model 270

We had this exact thing happen to customers using BCC drives. Install PTF *poof* drive goes away and it was in a 270. Luckily they had just one so RAID kept them alive until a replacement from BCC arrived that was compatible with the PTF. (The drive had to be purchased by the way it was not sent as a replacement for a failed drive.) As I understand it, the PTF required some particular operation that the older BCC drive didn't support, when the drive wouldn't answer it got voted off the island.

IBM Would never do that to their own drives because they know what they can and cannot do.

A classic case was back in the old emulator board days of the S/36. One of the third party board makers was touting that IBMs board had a chip on it that added cost and provided no function. The competitor could sell cheaper because the chip was not there. They even had pictures with the IBM chip circled as the reason why IBM was more expensive. Then the AS/400 was introduced and the chip was required or you couldn't connect. The advertisements (and as I recall the competitor) went away quickly. This also happened to Decision Data workstations more than once with OS upgrades wiping them out until new PROMs were installed.

IBM frequently has unused stuff in their hardware that doesn't get used until deemed necessary. Since the 3rd party guys have to reverse engineer the data stream they don't see the unused capabilities. When IBM makes use of these functions the third party guys sometimes aren't ready.

- Larry

Joe Pluta wrote:

These were drives originally running in an iSeries, not just third party
drives. How would IBM make these stop working? Are you saying if I apply a
PTF the drives might stop working? What's to stop that from happening on
any older drives, IBM or not?

Joe

From: Pat Barber
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2007 9:25 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: 6618 drives for model 270

Some folks have had luck using non-IBM drives but IBM
can and does change micro-code for disk controllers and
poooof...no more disk drives. I would not attempt such
a change for the very small saving.


Joe Pluta wrote:

Has anybody ever put a 6618 drive from BCC/eStorage into a model 270?
Specifically into the main case, not an expansion box.

Joe