26 Sep
2006
26 Sep
'06
3:39 p.m.
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?
27 Sep
27 Sep
3:48 p.m.
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
29 Sep
29 Sep
2:56 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.
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