There was
one 8-bit ISA hard disk controller card for the IBM PC
or XT that would do a 1:1 interleave, from Patterson Labs. Don't
know how they did it, but they worked. They were always unusual,
probably impossible to find today, but Google it.
RLL was way too fast for the PC/XT bus at 1:1 interleave, but
there was at least one 8-bit controller from Seagate that worked with
only one 30 MB IDE drive. I don't remember the numbers. They would
work with a higher interleave, 3 or 4 sounds about right.
Why not just get a SCSI controller? Surely you can get an AHA-1542 or
something to work on an 8-bit bus, and it'll probably have better
performance (and easier to find disks) than any IDE or MFM/RLL (ST-506)
controller for the era.
I believe the AHA-1542 (and B, C, and CF) were all 16-bit boards, whereas I'm
trying to increase the I/O of an 8-bit IBM 5150...
--
Jim Leonard (trixter(a)oldskool.org)