External MFM/ESDI?

[Tim Shoppa]

"Wolfe, Julian " <ISC277 at CLCILLINOIS.EDU> wrote:
> 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?

Especially as you're looking for something vaguely DEC-ish,
in the late 80's/early 90's TRIMM made a rack-mount box that looked a lot
like a BA23 but held four full-height 5.25" hard drives. It
came with your choice of transition panels for SCSI or MFM/ESDI.

And it even used DEC drive skid plates :-).

ESDI cabling is differential for all high-speed signals, so you
can get a fair amount of length on it especially if you use Twist-N-Flat.

While there were some PC-clone-oriented ESDI drives that were
basically just warmed-over MFM drives, there were also large number
of truly heavy-duty ESDI drives made for storage arrays in the late 80's
through the early 90's. The Hitachi ones are particularly heavy-duty.
When these hit the surplus market in the mid-90's I was in heaven!

Tim.