On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 06:39:00AM -0600, Robert Bonomi wrote: > > > > > > > AHA. probably an 'RL-05', cousin to the better known "RK-05" > > I had a memory fault -- the RLs were the RL-01 and RL-02. > > > > > > 14" media, in a 'cartridge'. I -think- it was an 'SMD' interface > > > > 14" could be true as it just fitted into a 19" rack. > > Virtually all 'removable platter' or 'removable pack' storage of the day > was 14" media. :) > > There were some "high-capacity" _non-removable-media_ drives that used > much larger media. A friend had a coffee table made from a 45" disk > platter.
Control Data Corp made the drives with the large platters - 45" sounds about right. It was the 808 Disk drive. It was built on a huge heavy cast aluminum frame (to counteract vibration)and the heads were 'loaded' and positioned hydraulicly. There was a large and noisy pump unit right next to it. It was quite fast at read/write. Here one was set up to only use a couple of cylinders to reduce seek time and then used as a swap disk. CDC was actually a major disk manufacturer in their day. I also used that DEC setup with the removable disk cartridges on a PDP-11 an later on a 8650. The 8650 had lots of other disk, but a cartridge was still used for the system controller that did things like controlling the boot, etc. ////jerry _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"