DEC hardware questions

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Tue Apr 4 18:09:00 2000

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 03:11:32PM -0500, Lawrence LeMay wrote:
> A RP03 i'm told is a multi-platter drive for a PDP11. Does anyone know
> anything else about it? How much storage are we talking about, compared to
> an RK05?

It's a 12-platter drive, physically huge IIRC (it's been a while), but only
holds 40 MB. RT-11 makes one RP03 look basically like two RP02s, since it
exceeds RT's 32 MB limit (and this was before the MSCP partition kludge).
The controller is an RP11C or RP11E (not sure what the difference is).
DEC originally used RP03s on PDP-10s, I'm not sure whether the low-level
format is the same on both, but as far as PDP-11 software is concerned
it looks like a true blue 512 b/s device, 10 sectors per track, 20 heads,
and 406 cyls of which 400 are normally used (the extras are for the maindecs).

For comparison, an RK05 holds 2.5 MB.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Tue Apr 04 2000 - 18:09:00 BST