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Anybody remember ESDI drives ???. Glad they only lasted a few years before the industry decided on IDE.
by tibbydudeza 5y ago
Anybody remember ESDI drives ???.
Glad they only lasted a few years before the industry decided on IDE.
- brudgers 5y agoI remember it being about as messy as ST506. I think IBM used them in some of their PS/2's. I had a Model 80 that I rescued from the dumpster. It had cost about $7000 new.
- adrian_b 5y agoIn 1990, the company where I worked bought some IBM PC/AT compatibles with 80386DX @ 25 MHz and a pair of 150 Mbyte Maxtor ESDI HDDs. At that time, having 300 Mbyte of HDDs in your PC was HUGE compared to more typical PCs, which had just a 30 Mbyte MFM HDD, usually from Seagate. That was the only time when I have used ESDI drives, but those were great for that time. When I left that company, six years later, all the ESDI drives from the 20 or so PCs bought in 1990 were still in use, without any failure.
- tibbydudeza 5y agoWe used them with read caching controllers - some fancy board with lots of RAM with a Motorola 68020 onboard but they caused more issues than the performance advantage. Also remember ESDI was a pain to setup - it was a hack on ST506 so there was startup software to patch the BIOS you had to run to do the proper translation from head/cylinders to blocks done.
- adrian_b 5y agoYou are right, but for a few years, until IDE/ATA became available, the ESDI drives offered faster and bigger HDDs than anything available on the MFM Seagate interface, at still decent prices.