OBSOLETE HARD DISKS
Maintenance manager José Juventino Ulloa Rocha didn't want to take any chances. He needed to keep the roll grinders running for another few years with obsolete controls. He had run out of spare hard disks.
The cambering systems relied on Seagate hard disks. Some of these disks kept running 24-7 for more than 20 years. Most didn't. The Israeli company M-Systems produced compatible devices - until SanDisk bought them. Herkules Controls Corp. manufactured a batch of solid state replacements. All disappeared into obsolescence.
Kudos to Steve Bristow of Peripheral Vision (Technology) Ltd (PV) for invaluable assistance with the selection and supply of SCSI emulators. PV's emulators have now functioned well for over a year on machines in the Skin Pass and Z-Mill Roll Shops of Outokumpu Mexinox in San Luis Potosi.
Worldwide more than a 100 control systems of this type were running at the end of the last century. Might some roll shop manager somewhere still benefit from this story?
Robert Spruit, Ford City, PA, USA
"Peripheral Vision treated me like I was their most important customer. We had to adapt their product to a peculiar legacy host system with several hurdles to overcome. They took on the challenge after the project had been turned down by other firms. I worked closely with their support staff and was expertly guided through several iterations of custom firmware to adapt their product to the specific needs of my host system. The result was a seamless integration with greatly enhanced storage capacity and speed, these guys know SCSI!"
Jonathan Haddox, Systems Consultant, USA
"Today the project is finished: The PT31 runs with a CF card in it instead of a hard disk. Now, it has a noise and performance we've never known before. Even the "free seconds" increased from 9552 to 16377. A special thanks to Steve from Peripheral Vision, who has solved many compatiblity problems."
Dirk Henningsen, DH-Media
"The Siemens EWSD backup routine also ran smoothly, that’s great that everything works. Thank you very much for your support !"
Markus Hüsken & Jürgen Kramer, HeLi NET Telekommunikation GmbH & Co.
"I found the people at Peripheral Vision were very helpful and were able to fix the issues that we saw when the SCSICFDisk was attached as an ODD on our AXE10 installation. I can say that the SCSI-CF device may completely replace the MO drive in AXE if IOG20C is used."
Mikhail Isanov