History (1988): DEC RA90 HDD and SA600 Array

Digital Equipment Corp. was expected to make a comeback in disk drive manufacturing. It seems to be true with the announcement of the RA90 disk drive and the SA600 storage array.

The SA600 includes 4 or 8 RA90 drives, the first version should be available in 2 months, with a 4.8GB capacity for $125,000, the second in 3 months with 9,7GB for $225,000.

The RA90 is based on thin-film technology for the platters and the heads, both manufactured by DEC. It has an average access time of 17,5ms and a 1.2GB.

These direct-access storage devices (DASD) are mostly for transaction processing system, called DEC TP by Digital Equipment. Four SA600 can be attached to a controller, allowing up to 38.8GGB of storage per controller.

The storage array comes with 1-year hardware warranty including on-site service and Vaxsim Plus, an expert system program that predicts possible failures.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠6, volume ≠1, published on July 1988.