RE: 6618 drives for model 270

Well this just sucks.

The primary reason I want to go with the BCC drives is that they are 15K
drives rather than the 10K IBM drives. This machine tops out at V5R4; I
wonder if I should just apply V5R4 and the latest cumes and then never apply
another PTF.

Speaking of PTFs, isn't that what A and B sides are for? Isn't there a
procedure to apply a PTF and if it smokes, to go back to the pre-PTF state?

Joe

From: Larry Bolhuis

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.