29 Sep
2006
29 Sep
'06
5:56 a.m.
"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.