Night-shift horror a screamer

Virtually unsupervised, the "new guy" got a thorough initiation when faced with a night-shift full of spun-down drives Back in the glory days of mainframe computing, the University I worked at had an IBM timeshare machine. Connected to it was more than the usual number of disk drives because there were so many users. In those days, a disk drive was about the size of a washing machine and they were so expensive t

Virtually unsupervised, the "new guy" got a thorough initiation when faced with a night-shift full of spun-down drives

Back in the glory days of mainframe computing, the University I worked at had an IBM timeshare machine. Connected to it was more than the usual number of disk drives because there were so many users. In those days, a disk drive was about the size of a washing machine and they were so expensive that they had removable disk packs. These drives were usually located in rows and columns on the floor, something like a checkerboard to minimize cable lengths. This was colloquially called a disk farm.

Because of the way our machine room was configured, the disk farm was located on the floor directly below the main computer. The unmounted disk packs were stored in the same area on shelves along the walls

When a user wanted data that was not online, he would go downstairs, spin down an appropriate disk drive, remove the 40-lb. disk pack, mount the new disk pack, spin the drive up and tell the OS it was now available. The machine-room staff performed this procedure numerous times a day, all three shifts (we ran 24/7).

John, the new staffer in the machine room, had been given the worst shifts -- midnight to 8:00 a.m. Unfortunately, this shift was also the least supervised, but that did not bother John -- he was young, enthusiastic and eager to learn.

One early morning about 3:00 a.m., one of the disk drives went offline. When the alarm sounded at the console, John was dispatched to investigate. Upon arriving at the offending drive he found it was indeed spun down. First, he spun the drive up. It came up, displayed some status lights, then spun down again. John was puzzled. He didn't quite understand the meaning of all those status lights yet, but he did know that there was really not that much to the things -- just a drive and a disk pack. His supervisor was not available, but John figured he had a way to fix this problem.

It must be a faulty disk pack, he decided. No problem. He knew where the test packs were, so he carted one out and mounted it. Same thing. He knew that test packs didn't always perform correctly, so he decided to try another. Still no success.