On Wed, 19 May 2021 07:48:40 -0600, rbowman
wrote:

On 05/19/2021 04:03 AM, wrote:
Heh. For some of our customers who cannot upgrade to newer stuff,
we occasionally buy replacements on Ebay. PowerPC processors,
some I/O boards, hard drives...

I think we still have some dusty old RS/6000 boxes hiding in the corner
unless the new IT guy got rid of them. Those old SCSI drives weren't
cheap in their day and a working one might finance a programming cookout.

I guess that was why the ones I came up with were such hot trade
items. I got a mod 57 for a couple of lightning drives. I was always
holding a bunch of SCSI drives but I got rid of the 320/400m 3.5"
"lightning" drives and the 2g "starfires" as fast as I could while
they were still working. The absolute best was the 310m from a small
white box AS/400. I never saw a bad one but all of those full size
5.25 drives were pretty tough. I used the 900m "elite" drives in a
9404 "shoebox" like diskettes. As long as you had one in the system
when you booted, you could hot swap them. (on a PS/2).

Usually the 310s came to me from sales changes when they upgraded
AS/400s from 310m to 857m. They shipped the whole shoebox with the
drive installed so it was just a "no tool" in and out swap. The old
ones were "recycle" items. The lightning drives got to me "bad" but it
was always just that $2 interposer. I had a bunch of them.