OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices

> 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. ;)

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.

I really like to see those old dmesgs, quite amazing work supporting this in OpenBSD (at the time)

Another oddly interesting interface related to SMD was IPI. Sun used it for a bit as their high end disks.

This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?

The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."

hug of death

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