Setup and Benchmarks of Several ESDI Hard Disks and Controller Cards

Introduction

ESDI or Enhanced Small Device Interface was the mass storage interface I would like to have had in the late 1980s. It offered endless storage space in relation to the ST506/412 MFM or RLL systems, which were common at that time, not to speak from the data access speed and the data throughput ESDI was capable of. Unfortunately costs for ESDI storage were superior too.

From the mid 1990s on people wanted to get rid of their ESDI stuff. Some of it came to me. Of course I wanted to know more about the technology, the manufacturers and the performance. Over the years I've hoarded some stuff (user manuals, setup software and device drivers for certain operating systems), which might be useful, if you like to setup a contemporary computer system with an ESDI storage subsystem.

As always I'm specifically interested in the hardware performance.

I will divide the story in two sections, which might be read one after the other or each by itself. The first part discusses the physical setup of the tested ESDI harddisks and controllers, supplemented by manufacturer's user manuals and setup software. You will not need in-depth knowledge of disk drive technology to make use of this content, but basic knowledge about some topics would be helpful, since they are not explained in detail here. Scott Mueller wrote an instructive and short(!) introduction of disk drive technology, which gives an operational overview of hard disks and explains terms like 'cylinder', 'head', 'sector', 'track', 'interleave', 'head skew', 'cylinder skew' etc.

If you like, you may start the first section with a look of the tested hard drives.

The second part contains the benchmark section with the test setup and the benchmark results. Here is Scott Mueller's nice introduction of hard disk drive performance.

Since data throughput is measured in megabits per second and storage capacity in megabyte, it seems to be a good idea to determine the measurements first. I will use the following abbrevations and units:

All external links are operative as of November 2015.

Feel free to contact me if you discover any mistakes or inaccuracies. You will find my Email address below.