OpenBSD developer revives 25-year-old Sun workstation with medieval SMD disks
OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
Miod Vallat recounts his long-running effort to bring a Sun-4/260 workstation back to life. The machine, powered by a 16.67MHz SPARC processor, used SMD disks—massive, power-hungry drives from the 1980s that weighed as much as a dead donkey. After years of neglect, a misconnected cable was discovered, reviving a second drive. The story offers a nostalgic look at vintage hardware and the quirks of early Sun systems.
These disks would also, of course, weigh as much as a dead donkey, if not two.
- elcritch
> SMD disks were first using 11" platters, later 8"; and with a nominal speed of 3600 rpm, thus 60 rotations per second (although Fujitsu later deviated from the norm and had a few drives spinning even faster, at 3961rpm), it took a noticeable amount of power to spin these disks up (and a smaller one to keep them spinning, which one would notice when receiving the bill from the electricity company).
I wouldn't mind having a few of these to act as backup flywheel batteries. Maybe if civilization crashes these will make a comeback as dual use power & data storage devices. ;)
- fodkodrasz
I wonder how NetBSD would work with the hardware, if the mentioned bugs were already fixed there maybe?
NetBSD has wide old/obscure platform, with a wider community using it somewhat more actively on those.
- natas
I really like to see those old dmesgs, quite amazing work supporting this in OpenBSD (at the time)