tag changed

>We had some scarey monents with it though. When a
>controller unit or feedback unit failled it would
>decide to come bombing towards you at 3 meters per
>second. This may not seem much but it had enough
>momentum to topple half a ton of machine towards you
>if it wasn=92t bolted down to the floor.

Shades of some of the 14 inch platter disk drives I used to work on. The
first one I had dealings with was made by a company called Dynex, and had=
 a
single fixed and single removable platter, with 3+3 or 6+6MB. These were
finicky things which needed regular cleaning, and if alignment was needed=
,
it was done with much care and trepidation as it was all too easy to make=
 it
do an emergency head unload if you pushed the voice coil too far so it we=
nt
off track and the electronics decided there was an error it couldn't
correct.

The other one I had dealings with was a CDC unit with a 10 platter (IIRC)
pack of 300MB total. That thing had a huge motor in it which had the
platters spinning from a standing start to host online in 15 seconds flat.
You definitely kept fingers out of the voice coil area if it was going to=
 do
any seek operation. Rapid seek operations would shake the floor of any
raised floor computer room. These machines were used by many mainframe
suppliers as an OEM disk drive.

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