Suppose the drives were from the Lilith/Eve workstations. Would the
unix trick of using dd still work?
--
nope. they had their own custom drive interface.
same is true for pretty much every disc before SCSI common command set.
while 512 byte block scsi or ide interfaced mass storage devices now
seem like the only things that ever existed, before the mid 80's there
was no real block-level hard disc standard across manufacturers.
the closest would have been hpib, but that was really only used by HP.