Almost disjoint abelian groups

Under various set-theoretic hypotheses we construct families of maximal possible size of almost free abelian groups which are pairwise almost disjoint, i.e. there is no non-free subgroup embeddable in two of them. We show that quotient-equivalent groups cannot be almost disjoint, but we show how to construct maximal size families of quotient-equivalent groups of cardinality א₁, which are mutually non-embeddable.