Re: [CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit

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From	Bob Eager <news0005@eager.cx>
Newsgroups	comp.misc, alt.folklore.computers
Subject	Re: [CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit
Date	24 Apr 2015 00:38:05 GMT
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On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 21:44:08 +0000, RS Wood wrote:

> The DEC RL02 drive is the closest you’re going to get to a modern
> mechanical hard drive with these old machines. It’s a huge rack unit
> with removable platters that can hold 10 Megabytes of storage. [Chris]
> found one of these old drives and because he wanted to get into FPGA
> development, decided to create a USB adapter for this huge, old drive.
> 
> The hardware isn’t too terribly complex, with a microcontroller and an
> FPGA that exposes the contents of the drive over USB mass storage. For
> anyone trying to bootstrap a PDP-11 or -8 system, [Chris] could download
> disk images from the Internet, write them to the disk, and load up the
> contents of the drive from the minicomputer. Now, he’s using it with
> SimH[2] to have a physical drive for an emulated system, but the
> controller really doesn’t care about what format the disk pack is in. If
> [Chris] formatted a disk pack with a FAT file system,
> he would have the world’s largest and heaviest USB thumb drive in the
> world.

Nice. I have two of those drives downstairs here at home!



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[CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-04-23 21:44 +0000
  Re: [CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit Bob Eager <news0005@eager.cx> - 2015-04-24 00:38 +0000

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