On 2/13/20 9:56 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: I supplied part numbers. How can I be more specific? They are d-sub male connectors on both ends. Data a single is 25-pin cable, but I have two drives. so ideally need two. Command is a pair of cables, one 25-pin and the other 37-pin. I don't know if the pins are straight through or whether they do any swapping from one end to the other. alan

https://www.memoryxsun.com/5301079.html https://www.memoryxsun.com/5301080.html When I ordered them just after the new year, it was $124 shipped for two data cables and a command cable pair. The data cables have increased in price by $100 each since then. Maybe that is why my email isn?t getting answered? They have ?one left? command cable pair on eBay for a lower price. I am tempted to buy it except I already paid them for another one. alan

On 2/14/2020 4:17 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Storage module device, Control data's drive interface. 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

I have a 3/260 with the ?storage pedestal?, a pair of 8? SMD drives in a deskside chassis the same size as the system chassis. It was originally purchased and used by Mentor Graphics. A now-former employee bought it and used it for a while, then put it in his open barn, where it sat for a dozen years. He gave it to me last year and I am trying to get it running for VCF-PNW in a bit over a month. The big problem is a particular bit is always staying on during the memory path data test, so it won?t even come up to the boot prom. If I can?t get past that, the lack of SMD cables are not a problem :) alan PS I forgot to thank Liam for offering assistance, so thanks, Liam.

On Thu, 13 Feb 2020 at 19:06, Alan Perry via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Oddly, some of us do not have a mental look-up table of Sun part numbers. In fact I think I can safely say that I could not identify a single cable of any form for any machine ever made by its part number. If you can, good for you. But if someone, say, told me "I need some SCSI cables: a MD50 to MD68 cable, 2 ? MD68 to MD68, an MD50 terminator and ideally a DB25 to MD50," then I would be able to say "yes, I have some of those". However, since Jim has been a bit more forthcoming, it sounds like I can't help you. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

On 2/14/2020 6:09 AM, Alan Perry via cctalk wrote: The SCSI spec and cabling have a specific way that the conductors have to be rolled to make a round cable.? Each cable type has a recommended way that signal and grounds should be paired and in what proximity in the cable. For SMD I never saw a formal spec with as much detail as the SCSI spec, and I don't know if they standardized the cabling.? Mainly to speculate about whether you can use a generic 25-25 or 37-37 straight thru. I suspect the 25-25 would be sensitive to the type of conductor pairing and fabrication would work.? The 37-37 bus connector probably would work with looser electrical specs to substitute in different cabling. Also just to make things more entertaining on the Oracle site for sun hardware they are using the term "Storage Module Drive" to refer to 6g/s SAS drives installed in individual blades for a blade server system.?? So the term appears frequently in their online docs, and including old documents and current documents. Here's one example of that term on a page https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19452-01/html/821-0911/gkfcf.html If I'm not far off base, I ran across two vendors who may have made the controller if they aren't sun, Interphase, and Xylogics.? Also an article referred to the Sun boards as Eurocard from Xylogics. Xylogics 753. Thanks Jim

On 2/14/2020 2:00 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: With all the "cat" foolishness the shysters have gotten in and it's about like the old nonsense with stereo amps "watts" and the current "oxygen free copper" cabling for speakers.? Hard to trust any advertised cables and pick ones that actually adhere to any specs. I am not very good at terminating network cables, and prefer to buy all pre-terminated, so what you are referring to is very frustrating.? And I've not even started to touch the 10gb networking realm to figure out how to get optimum cabling and networking set up with that technology. thanks Jim

On 2/14/2020 11:11 PM, Alan Perry via cctech wrote: They used the exact same name as the SMD drives you have.? But as you say they are SAS, which are the somewhat older cousins of SATA drives, and nothing to do with your dries. The drives usually had two 60 pin IDC's one in front of the other. You'd usually put a terminator for the daisy chain of the 60 pin bus cable in the outer cable, and there was enough space between them to put the ribbon cable.? They used braided cables most times I ever saw them. The radial cable had a ground plane type ribbon cable with flat parallel conductors composting the rest of the 26 pin cable.? Had to have one for each drive from the controller to each drive. I was going to suggest replacing the sun mess of cables with just one 60 pin cable and a 26 pin cable, and run with one drive, but realize you probably only have the sun method of terminating the bus (60 pin) cable.? it needs termination at the controller, and on the last drive.? Since your system was set up with the sun connection and cabling, you don't have a standalone SMD terminator, which is a small 60 pin thingie that looks a lot lie the Single Ended SCSI terminator for the 50 pin SCSI IDC cabling arrangement.

On Fri, 14 Feb 2020, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: 26-1401 TRS80 printer cable - 34 pin card-edge to 36 pin "blue-ribbon" ("centronics"/amphenol) 26-1207 TRS80 cassette cable. Also fits IBM 5150 din to mini-phone plugs (not much of a refutation of your point)