ESDI Cabling - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

29 Sep 1998

Tony Duell wrote:

...

 As far as I can tell the cables required for a single ESDI drive are the
 same as for a MFM drive.  Is this correct? 
AFAIK yes, provided there are no twists in them. Some PC control (34 pin)
cables have twists so you can set all the hard drives to the same drive
number. This doesn't work with ESDI.

And no, I am not confusing this with a PC floppy cable, which also has a
twist, but in a different place.

But the ESDI cables are standard 20 pin (radial data) and 34 pin
(control) cables. 

ESDI cables for PC's may or may not have a twist. The drive has a jumper
(usually marked drive 1 or 2) that must be set accordingly.

I've had a lot of trouble getting old ESDI drives to work also, especially
with Western Digital controllers. I thought all my drives were bad until I
found a Future Domain controller that worked with most of them. The drives
also need to be low level formatted by the card being used.

Hans Olminkhof