Largest ST-506 (MFM or RLL) type HDD?

[Jerome H. Fine]

 >Ethan Dicks wrote:

>On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 4:55 PM,  <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>The DEC RD54 (Maxtor XT-2190) was 159MB or so. I once had a brace of
>>them on a PC.
>>    
>>
>
>I had a PCs or two with a Micropolis 1325, but I'd already converted
>over to Adaptec SCSI controllers and embedded SCSI drives (frequently
>surplus/castoffs from a Sun environment) rather than go above about
>60MB on MFM/ST412.  I didn't get an IDE drive for anything until after
>1992 - it was all small MFM and large(er) SCSI for my sub-32-bit
>environments.  Any "large" disks ended up going on VAXen and PDP-11s.
>
>The idea of a PC with "a brace" of FH 5.25" drives on it is somewhat
>daunting.  The closest thing I can imagine to it is a fully-loaded
>BA123, and I've never *seen* one of those above two or three spindles.
>
Starting around 1997, I was using a Pentium 166 MMX with 2 * Hitachi 1.5 
GB DK516-15
ESDI FH 5.25" hard drives as my storage devices.  They were my C: and D: 
drives with the
D: drive serving ONLY as a backup.  I still have a few around which were 
also used on a
BA123 running RT-11 on a PDP-11/83 with a Sigma RQD11-EC ESDI Qbus 
controller.

I stopped using them for the PC around 2002 when I switched to a Pentium 
III with 3.5 " drives.
These were 3 * Maxtor  D540X-4X of 40 GB each.  Unfortunately, the 
Maxtor drives failed
around 2006 when I switched to 160 GB drives.

On the other hand, I still occasionally use the Hitachi DK516-15 ESDI 
drives on the BA123.
It would seem that except for the RD53 drives, all of the old MFM and 
ESDI drives that I used
with a DEC system still work.  But the IDE drives, especially the Maxtor 
drives, lasted only 3 years.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine