“Four times as much space?”

“Yea, the 2314 drives look like a morgue, the ones we have look like a portable dishwasher.  I bet those packs are heavy, with the eleven disks instead of the six the 11’s have.  Someone will get a hernia if they have to handle them too much.  We don’t want people swapping them too often.”

“When are they available?”

“They release early next year, we need to plan for them.  Right now we have 42 meg on 6 spindles, we could add 2 more for about $250 a month each, then the controller is out of space, it only handles 8 drives, that’s about $550 a month for the second one of them.  We don’t have room on the floor for another one.  The 2314’s will fit were the 2311’s sit, we actually would get more floor space if we could get rid of the data cell, the 2321.  Imagine the headaches we could prevent if that noodle snatching strip smasher were gone? Our disks are costing us $2100 a month now, for $2500 or so we can go to the 3214 with 8 spindles, that’s just over 200 meg.  And it’s in a single package.  And the data comes in twice as fast because they spin at the same rate and have twice as much data on a track.”

“That’s great, two hundred megs, that’s half the data cell.  And less money.”  The data cell, the IBM 2321 was a very slow, mechanical and unreliable mass storage that held 400 megs.  Randy was amazed, he didn’t think Vince even knew how many bytes were on anything.  Vince was a good manager but generally not too technically astute.  But he apparently listened some.

Author’s note.  The 2321 was IBM’s answer to its inability to make a big disk drive.  It produced 400 Meg with 2000 strips heavy mag tape each about 3×14 inches and hanging in a cylinder.  he machine picked a strip, wrpped it on the red drum, read it and put it away, most of the time.  Sometimes it smashed a strip, gone 1/5 of a meg.  Sometimes it smashed the strip and the head, gone the data and about 6 hours of time to repair.  Sometimes it got the drum too, that took even longer to get a replacement. 

Randy continued, “They’re a lot faster and they should be more reliable.  We need to get that damn data cell out of here, it’s down about once a week, it takes nearly a second to get some data and it is really slow.”