Hi Brian, (this is Carl Friedberg) I only recently began reading ITRC, and just finished this story. During our long use of an HSZ50 (way more than 10 years), we never had a situation like the one you describe with the HSJ. We did have a few controller failures, bad cache batteries, and disks failed about once a month. I never, ever, used anything but RAID 1; I wanted the better performance of RAID 1 over RAID 5. I went through a long, painful series of steps to upgrade disks, from 4GB to 9 GB to 18 GB to 36 GB (and the HSZs were limited to a small number of those, 2 in each disk shelf, IIRC). However, we never lost a bit of data, nor ever had any forced errors, so far as I know. I am also happy that we had DEC, then compaq, then HP hardware and software support (and until he was laid off by HP last year, we had the same experienced hardware engineer).
If you ever are fortunate enough to acquire an EVA, you will be amazed at how much easier it is to manage all of this.
I am glad to hear that HP engineering addressed the backup issue on VMS 7.x release, and made it available to a customer without a support contract.
Problems Solved
