RL02K Pack Reliability/Characteristics

Were all of the packs written on systems with the same word length? If come were written on a PDP8-A, You might get garbage reading them on a PDP11.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:47 AM, Christopher Parish < christopher.parish at parishcomputers.com> wrote: > I've gotten my RL-02 -> USB Mass Storage controller mostly working with a > few residual gremlins. Specifically, I've noticed from my testing that I > have good packs, ones that read out almost the same every time, and bad > packs, ones where half the bits seem to be in different states every time I > read them. I've left write support untested until I can solve this problem. > > Right now, my working theory is that different controllers had slightly > different timing characteristics, and I may need to adjust more of my DPLL > parameters dynamically to deal with that (something I'd rather avoid). Of > course, most of these packs haven't been put into a drive since the > mid-80s, and there could be some bit rot going on. > > As many of you have much more experience dealing with these drives than I > do, my questions are: > > - What type of long term reliability have people noticed from their RL02K > packs? > > - Is garbage data sometimes normal for certain packs until they are > rewritten with ?fresh? data? > > - Has anyone noticed pack compatibility problems between various > computers/RL-02 controllers? > > Thanks, > Christopher