On 3/13/07, Francesca Smith <fsmith at ladylinux.com> wrote: You don't have to pull the drives - the DB25 connector on the back of your pedestal is a DEC-standard way of externally cabling RX02s - it was done the same way with the table-top RX02 shell for the MINC-11. If you get your 11/73 together, you could aquire or make a cable to go to the back of your DECmate pedestal. No removal required. Can't help you there. I've used DSD drives, Heathkit drives, and, on a Dataram PDP-11 clone, a Shugart drive with a 3rd-party controller that emulated the RXV21 at the register level (no bizarre drivers, at least). I don't have anything really bad to say about the RX02s except they are somewhat physically large compared to other offerings. You don't have to. You could, but then you need a way to get the files off the Rainbows. We've been discussing RX50s recently here - with the right PC-compatible drive, you can just read RX50 media in a modernish box (one old enough have proper floppy support, so, _in general_, something with a Pentium-I or older is probably a safe bet, but the only way to know for certain is to know the capabilities of your hardware and most likely to run a few quick tests) Personally, I maintain an older box with a 5.25" floppy that reads and writes RX50s just fine. Haven't had occasion to fire it up lately, so I should probably do that to see if the heads have glued down to the platters or if the CMOS battery as died. It's an old 486DX2/66 VLB box - too old to run a modern OS, but powerful enough to run an OS capable of capturing diskette images and squirting them over an Ethernet card to something "modern" for burning and archiving. You can use a Rainbow if you want, but that way would seem to me to be adding difficulty to the task without a corresponding payback, especially given how sloppy the tolerances are with real RX50 drives. -ethan