Three RA60 disk drives in rack | 102733639

Description

DEC RA60 enables mobile online storage for data critical businesses.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) launched the Digital Storage Architecture (DSA) in the early 1980’s, which was a revolutionary architecture which included logical addressing, automatic bad block management, Reed-Solomon ECC, and dual port serial interconnects. This became the underpinnings of the VAXcluster, DEC’s all-time most successful product.

The RA60 was the last DSA removable media disk drive produced by DEC and started shipping in 1982. It had a unique fully-embedded servo system, with each head independently seeking and track-centerlng when selected, assuring pack interchange, with no need for head alignment. There were three 14” disks in a pack with 205 Mbytes of formatted capacity in a rack-mounted 10.5” high by 19” wide top-loading unit. Controllers for the RA60 included UDA50 for UNIBUS, KDA50 for QBUS and HSC50 and its successors for VaxClusters.

The RA60 was a companion to the DEC RA80 and RA81 fixed disk drives, plus their successors. It became a favorite of Wall Street, since the disk packs could be picked up by taxi and moved back and forth across the river, in order to provide interchangeable backup copies of active files, in case of a brown out, which happened often in those days. For financial institutions that were required to have remote “hot” databases, removable disk storage was a compelling solution, before the Internet with adequate bandwidth was invented. As a result, the RA60 was used throughout the 1980’s and beyond.

The VaxCluster also had the unique capability of generating at least three independent, simultaneous two-way confirmations of financial transactions in real-time, which needed to match before the transaction was completed. This put DEC squarely in the driver’s seat for secure financial transactions.

Text by Thomas Burniece, Grant Saviers
Submitted: February 20, 2022

Date

ca 1987

Manufacturer

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

Identifying Numbers

Model number	00-0RA60-EA	On DIGITAL tag on upper rear of rack.
Model number	RA60-AA	On bar-coded sticker on front of middle drive.
Model number	RA60-CA	On bar-coded sticker on front of top drive.
Model number	RP60-AA	On bar-coded sticker on front of bottom drive.
Other number	Z-07179	On DIGITAL asset tag on upper rear of rack.
Other number	Z-15082	On bar-coded sticker on front of top drive, Digital Asset number.
Other number	Z-15083	On bar-coded sticker on front of middle drive, Digital Asset number.
Other number	Z-15084	On bar-coded sticker on front of bottom drive, Digital Asset number.
Serial number	SP00011	On DIGITAL tag on upper rear of rack.
Serial number	SP15916	On bar-coded sticker on front of middle drive.
Serial number	SP15960	On bar-coded sticker on front of top drive.
Serial number	SP16008	On bar-coded sticker on front of bottom drive.