On 2/14/2020 4:17 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, 14 Feb 2020 at 00:42, jim stephens via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
Liam, he's looking for SMD, which need a Bus and Radial. One Bus can
daisy chain from drive to drive, and us usually 60 pin. The radial RF
cables are usually 26 pin ribbon. A separate cable from the controller
to each drive is required to hook up the system.
This term seems impossible to Google, since it normally refers to
Surface Mount Devices now, but by going via the Wikipedia article on
SCSI connectors, I think you both mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_Module_Device
Is that correct?
Storage module device, Control data's drive interface.
You're thinking about the 50 pin D-sub that went to the older deskside
bricks for workstations.
I have quite a wide variety of SCSI cables, including 25-pin, 50-pin,
68-pin and more, and covering most of the connectors, both to and
from. What I don't have any more are hardly any SCSI-equipped
computers, so I guess that the cables can go.
SMD external cables probably weren't that common. The systems I saw
which were of such as 4/280 etc, rack mounted had the cabling internal
to the bays and were of the ribbon variety. They used VME bus cards in
a large size carrier for the controllers in the system frame. The
system frame had cards that were about 18" high with an extra bus
connector. But if you aligned the VME cars to fit two of them, there
was apparently a vme bus.
Those systems that i saw had either 68k processors, or early Sparc
processors. The sun boards used all three bus connectors and the other
vendor boards as I sad were usually mounted in a sun dimensioned carrier
frame.
And reason for all this explanation was that they used a third part
vendor's SMD interface.
As to the connections to go outside the rack, all the systems I saw had
2 or so smd drives and were racked in a 6' bay with room for a tape
drive at the top, system in the center, and drives @ the bottom, and so
no need for external.
I am speculating that the Alan's system may have the system in a low
bay, and drives in a separate bay or bays. I never saw any sun systems
with other than 14" SMD drives, so there were no smaller drive boxes
than ones that were full 19" rack sized.
Liam, I suspect your cabling might have been for the older workstations,
which had "bricks" or "cement block" sized boxes with full size 5 1/4"
drives or in some cases 8" form factor drives.
And of course, the interfaces that Alan needed was were different than
your cabling.
Add SMD to the list of terms like microprocessor and microprocessing to
the list of mangled terms with two totally different meanings as well.
Thanks
Jim
