RA81 Disk Drive

4 RA81's in two cabinets

it's a dec disk drive. for a wealth of information...

14" 456 MB fixed drive. 36 msec avg. seek time, 2.2 MB/sec, SDI

The RA81 is a random-access, moving head (Winchester) fixed disk drive and was introduced in 1982. It has a non-removable media using a head/disk assembly (HDA) with a capacity of 456 Mbytes. The RA81 connects to the controller via the Standard Disk Interconnect (SDI) bus. Additional drives can be connected to a controller to increase the data storage capacity. The RA81 can also be connected in a dual-port arrangement permitting time-shared access by two controllers. The RA81 is a self-contained disk drive with built-in cooling system and DC power supply. An RA81 disk drive subsystem is made up of an SDI controller and one or more disk drives. Key figures are the following.

• Storage capacity of 456 Mbyte in 16-bit word format
• Heat dissipation is 644 Watt nominal
• 17.4 Megabit/sec peak transfer rate
• 28 mSec. average positioning rate (average seek time)
• 7 mSec. maximum positioning rate (cylinder to cylinder)
• 50 mSec. maximum seek (innermost to outermost cylinder, in total 1258 cylinders)
• 8.3 mSec. average rotational latency, rotational speed is 3600 RPM

A combined RA80/RA81 sales brochure is now online @ archive.org.

BSD disktab

#
# UCB RA81: use a-b-h-g or a-b-h-d-e-f
ucbra81|UCBRA81|DEC UCBRA81 Winchester:\
        :ty=winchester:ns#51:nt#14:nc#1248:\
        :dt=MSCP:\
        :pa#15884:oa#0:ba#8192:fa#1024:\
        :pb#33440:ob#15884:bb#4096:fb#512:tb=swap:\
        :pc#891072:oc#0:bc#8192:fc#1024:\
        :pd#15884:od#242606:bd#4096:fd#512:\
        :pe#307200:oe#258490:be#8192:fe#1024:\
        :pf#325382:of#565690:bf#4096:ff#512:\
        :pg#648466:og#242606:bg#4096:fg#1024:\
        :ph#193282:oh#49324:bh#4096:fh#512: