> >Well mine has been doing it for 10 years and the drives are RD54 and RD53
> >(MAxtor 2190 and Microplus 1325).  The box is stuffed to teh physical
> >limit. I would advise if you can sequence the drives it's a good thing
> >but, neither of those MFM drives have that capability.
> 
> There are significant power issues with stuffing a BA23 to the max,
> and many of us here have seen smoked and charred power supply harnesses
> and connectors that attest to some of these limits.  See the wiring
> harness FCO details in third-party-disks.txt if you aren't sure
> that you're up-to-date.

The FCO was to correct an ill designed harness that tended to fail vis
unequal current sharing of parallel leads.  Since the current on the
shortest lead easily exceeded what the conact could hand it wols heat, arc
and burn making the remaining ones cook in turn.  This has little to do
with exceeding the power supply limits, it was a distrubtion problem.  The
BA23 is sorta odd in that you either run out of space or in some cases run
out of power but rarely both at the same time.  With even a limited amount
of care though it's easy to cube out long before you run out power and
often it's just a matter of picking the right boards. For example there
are 8mb and 16mb cards for MVII that easily draw less power than the dec
designs did.  For that fact the DEC 8mb card is far less power than two
4mb cards. Also picking a DZV over a DHV can help in some cases or DELQA
VS DEQNA.  No matter what cards you use FIRST inpect the power harness and
replace if it is the unequal length part, that bad design did show
significant signs of stress at 60-70% of power supply rated load based on
testing at DEC. The corrected part was good to a minimum of 120%.

Allison