Den sön 23 apr. 2023 kl 08:34 skrev Christopher Zach via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt;gt;: Not necessarily. Yes, data rates are faster in ESDI. Up to 24 MHz and perhaps higher. But in ESDI the data separator is in the drive. The interface has a Data signal AND a clock signal so it is just a matter of storing a bit on a clock edge. The MFM emulator needs to oversample the data signal greatly to be able to decode the data correctly using the software MFM decoder. That would not be necessary with ESDI. But there are a number of complications with ESDI. Firstly there are both hard sector and soft sector formats and then not all soft sector formats are identical so using a different controller than which was used to format a drive is likely to be difficult. A reading device need to understand the format since the Read gate signal need to be enabled and disabled at certain times to allow for the data separator to resync in the gaps between sectors so the method used by the BBB solution to just read everything into a buffer at high speed for later processing wouldn't work AFAIK. To some extent the older SMD interface is similar to ESDI. Both have the data separator in the drive. Both have hard and soft sector formats. The difference is how commands are sent to the drive. SMD uses a parallel bus and tag while ESDI uses serial signalling. I have seen a device which interfaces an ESDI drive while providing a SMD interface to the host. /Mattis

I can’t say that’s been my experience. ok bear.