So did one you bid over $1500?
Not me. $1k would have been my limit, it's really kind of insane to run something like that. As I put on my old memory hat I remember that the platter would rust but at least the heads would not weld to the platter.
Also there were two timing tracks on it and if they were toast the platter was as well. Although these days you could probably just build a formatter for it from a Beaglebone and reformat. But at that point you could just have the BB spit out the head data right to the controller. And you could just replace the whole thing with a BB that could replicate every disk drive DEC made for the pdp8.
Not every model, every drive ever sold :-) C
-ethan
