The world's largest USB drive

Visitors to the retro computer festival in New Jersey saw many nostalgic and amazing exhibits. There were so many storage devices alone that they could save an entire movie in MP4.

Among the drives are ancient HDD, magnetic tapes, 8-inch floppy disks. All are only compatible with ancient hardware. With one exception: this is a DEC RL02 drive , which connects to a modern computer via USB!

The external drive DEC RL02 worked with PDP-11 and PDP-8 computers. The box weighing 34 kg in the 70s was positioned as an ultra-compact and portable device. But today it is the world's largest and heaviest portable USB drive.
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Information is stored in a 10.4 megabyte cartridge. The disk has exceptionally high performance for its time: the average search time is 55 milliseconds, the maximum is 100 milliseconds. Information was transmitted at a speed of 250 kilobytes per second with sequential reading.

Engineer Christopher Parish (Christopher Parish) developed a FPGA microcontroller to connect the DEC RL02 to a computer and recognize it as a USB Mass Storage device, so now he can always take the 34 kilogram compact USB stick on the road. Do not lose the good: drive as much as 10 MB.



Christopher publishes the circuit board and other project documentation on Github .