IBM’s ability to ship its forthcoming 3390 disk drives early next year is put into serious doubt if Electronic News’ catalogue of problems with the drives at the south San Jose plant are correct. The paper reports that not only is IBM getting yields of only 30% to 40% on the platters, but that there are microcode and electrical problems in the servo mechanism that may call into question the target 12mS average seek time. And the drive, which the paper says has been wholly redesigned, is said to have problems with head-disk interference caused by mechnical bugs and possible lubricant leaks. Most of the problems are of the kind that regularly crop up on large disk development programmes, and several have plagued IBM’s earlier generations of disk drives as well as those of other manufacturers, but all of them coming at once this close to intended shipment date is unusual.
