> The RC25 was one of the last cartridge drives (before fixed drives came back > in small sizes and exploding > capacity), somewhat interesting because of its compact size, and very odd and > hard to use because the > designers threw in a fixed platter. Perhaps they thought that it was a good > idea because it gave you double the > capacity at modest extra cost, but in practice it made for a major pain in > the software and operationally.
Many other compainess pulled a similar trick... The CDC 'Phoenix' (is that a 9648 or something) had a removeable pack containing one platter and 3 fixed platters. Capacity was 16MBytes per surface (or so), so the removeable pack stored 16Mbytes) (one data surface, one servo surface), the fixed part was 80 MBytes (5 data, 1 servo surface). Plessey made an RK05-a-like (same interface, linked to their version of the RK11-D, took same cartridges, same format, etc) with a fixed platter as well as the cartridge. Of course the HP7900 was like that too. I never really liked the idea. The main problem was you lost access to the fixed disk(s) while changing the removeable one. -tony
