>Ethan Dicks wrote:
> > "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinepw4z_at_compsys.to> wrote:
> > Also, the very last and probably least was the RC25 drive from DEC
> > (probably the worst hard drive that DEC ever produced from what I have
> > heard from others - never had the problem of having one myself) which
> > also used MSCP.
> I used to have an 11/725 w/RC25 (long story). I didn't think the drive
> was all that awful. It only had one motor, so you couldn't change
> cartridges without spinning down the fixed platter too, but that was
> only a problem occasionally. I was running VMS 4.6 on it, but a buddy
> of mine in Granville, OH, was (barely) running VMS 5.0 on it and using
> his 11/725 as a boot node for diskless workstations.
> What was so terrible about it?
Jerome Fine replies:
I heard from a number of individuals of their terrible experiences with
their RC25. In one case, they even had a tossing of the RC25 media
into the dumpster party when their PDP-11 was finally removed. By
that time, the RC25 had been taken off maintenance and failed again
shortly thereafter.
I never heard from anyone that the RC25 was even a reasonable drive,
let alone good. You are the first person to report anything approaching
a reasonable experience with the RC25.
By 1990, SCSI disk drives were so large and even removable magnetic
optical media like the Sony SMO S-501 and other similar drives were
so much better and larger in capacity that the RC25 was probably no
longer able to offer much competition in any case - even if the hardware
had been perfect.
I switched one PDP-11 system from RL02 media to the Sony SMO S-501
in 1990. They skipped right past the RDxx drives right to the magneto
optical storage since their primary requirement was removable media.
Each cartridge (actually each side of the cartridge - there are 290 MBytes
on each side) replaced about 15 RL02 packs. They had a total of
75 RL02 packs. Three media replaced three cabinets of RL02 packs.
Three copies (nine magneto optical cartridges - the size of a small loaf
of bread) were required in all. The additional two copied replaced
150 magnetic tapes - one for each RL02 pack.
I am NOT saying that the RL02 was a bad drive, just how the storage
situation changed between 1983 and 1990 when the RL02 and the
RC25 had become a wee bit out of date.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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Received on Thu May 09 2002 - 19:44:24 BST