SIX Button BA23 Front Panel

For those of you who have heard about a mythical SIX BUTTON FRONT PANEL for the BA23, it does exist and actually works. NOTE that the first hard disk drive MUST be set to DS3 and the second hard disk drive MUST be set to DS4. You will almost certainly destroy the format for BOTH hard drives if they are both set the same. A SIX button front panel for a BA23 had been sitting on my bench of spare parts for more than a decade. I finally had an opportunity to use it yesterday for the first time to make a backup copy of an RD51 to a second RD51 Both READ ONLY buttons operate independently and can be turned off and on at any time - as expected, but now verified. There is a simple work around which requires a bit of soldering to a short piece of 10 pin cable, but then the READ ONLY button can't be used very well and is not independent for both drives. I imagine that Tony could add a bit more with a switch that would work much better. If you don't ever use the READ ONLY button, then the simple work around will be sufficient. While I first backed up the RD51 to a TK25 before I installed the SIX button front panel, being able to directly copy (and compare) the two hard disk drives (especially an RD51 which takes under 3 minutes) is much more convenient. This is just to let anyone who is interested that if you are using an RQDXn with a BA23, you actually are able to place two hard drives in the same box. If I am also using the RX50, then I usually run extra long cables out the front of the BA23 and keep the RX50 outside the BA23. If the BA23 backplane is full and you are also using a TK70, then I put both the RX50 and the TK70 inside the BA23 and use the extra long cables to the hard disk drives PLUS I use a spare PC power supply for the hard disk drives so that I don't overload the BA23 power supply. NOTE that my experiments using a BA123 and ESDI Hitachi hard drives which tend to run rather hot and also require their own fans (when I used an external PC power supply), I found that the TK70 MUST use the internal power supply from the BA123. I imagine that the same would apply to the BA23 box for both a TK50 and a TK70. Yes, I occasionally do work with real DEC hardware. Jerome Fine