External MFM/ESDI?

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Well, I have a bunch of open expansion space in my RK07 cabinet, and I
> was thinking of somehow mounting the ESDI disks inside it.  What sort of
> products exist for mounting these disks externally, probably in a
> seperate cabinet from the controller?

IIRC the maximum cable lengths, certainly for the ST412 interface, are 
quite short. Probalby not long enough to put the drives in a separate 
rack cabinet. 

On my PC/XT, I have 2 5.25" floppy drives in the CPU box. So no space for 
hard dirives. The machine sits on top of another box that contains a pair 
of 3.5" floppies and a couple of ST412-interfaced hard drives. The former 
are linked to the external floppy connector on that card. I made up 
special cables from the hard disk controller's headers to D-connectors 
(DC 37 for the control lins, DB25 for the data lines), then cables from 
those connectors to the drives themselves. The first set of cables were 
fed out thtorgh a slot the hard disk controller's blanking plate, the 
conneectors being cable-moutned only. This works fine, but the cables are 
only about 18" long total.

-tony