RL02K Pack Reliability/Characteristics

[Paul Anderson]

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