DEC RL-01?

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Mar 27 19:01:01 2003

--- Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> Are these drives worth anything?

Anything?!? Almost certainly. More than coast-to-coast shipping? That
all depends.

I have several that I have used on my PDP-8/a. AFAIK, every controller
(including the RL8A) that talks to an RL02 will also talk to an RL01.
In the world of VAXen and PDP-11s, nearly everybody converted to RL02s
as soon as they could - same amount of floorspace and power but twice the
storage (10MB vs 5MB). I had a customer in 1987 that had RL01s on
their 11/34-based inspection system, but that was, in effect, a packaged
system (it was used to measure tooling for manufacturing artificial
diamond; the CPU was the *cheap* part of the rig :-)

The PDP-11/23 I did my work on had an RL01 as the system device (mine).
My boss loaned me an RL02 that we used to exchange data files with our
client.

I would say that these days, it's probably easier to find RL02 packs
than RL02 packs. The drives themselves are (depending on the exact
rev of the boards) nearly identical. With later rev boards, *the*
difference is the heads and the strapping of a few jumpers. There
was an occasionally-performed mod to make the stepper board switch
between RL01 and RL02 behavior (and assert Write Protect in RL01 mode)
that let you *read* RL01 packs or read/write RL02 packs in the same
drive, but you had to have a drive that you were willing to not have
on a service contract.

RL01 packs are clearly marked and use a brown color scheme. RL02 packs
have blue labels. Neither are user formattable (embedded servo, factory
prepped).

Did you find a quantity of them, or just see one or two float by?

Given the relative cost of RL02s these days, unless you have some RL01
packs to read (or drives to repair), they aren't particularly valuable.
Under PDP-11 and VAX operating systems, you might as well hold out for
the 10MB size. Under OS/8, AFAIK, the RL01 and RL02 are partitioned
differently because both are larger than the max device size (I have a
couple of RL01 packs with OS/8 on them, but I've never had an RL02 on
my RL8A - back when I paid $600 for the controller and $150 for each
RL01 drive, I couldn't afford the $1000 for an RL02 nor $200 per pack!)

Depending on how old the absolute filter is, the entire drive might be
cheaper than just the filter. Dunno how you'd evaluate it though, absent
accurate operators logs.

*I* like them, but then I never had any problems with them - never lost
a drive; never had a head crash; never lost any data (but I can say the
same thing for RL02s, so go figure).

-ethan
Received on Thu Mar 27 2003 - 19:01:01 GMT