On 02/11/2021 11:36 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
I'm a little confused on this. An ESDI drive, in my experience, behaves
exactly like an ATA one, right down to the command set. ESDI drives
can be soft-or-hard sectored.
No. ESDI is similar to MFM, there is a differential read
data pair on the 20-pin connector, but the data rate is much
higher, 10, 15 or 20 MBit/sec, and used a different encoding
scheme that gave more data bits/flux transition. I think
the 34-pin connector also allowed an additional head select bit,
so you could have up to 16 heads.
ATA has a single 40-pin connector with a 16-bit parallel
data bus for all command and data transfers.
Jon
