Category talk:MSCP Disk Drives

Sub-categories needed

So it turns out that MSCP is a fairly high-level protocol, which runs across several different lower-level hardware interfaces; I found out that the LESI lower-level bus was one that uses MSCP. It turns out that a major one is the Standard Drive Bus, which the RA81 (among many others) uses. I think we ought to have sub-categories of Category:MSCP Disk Drives for each physical bus, as I have done with Category:LESI Disk Drives, and move individual drive articles into the appropriate sub-category (e.g. Category:SDB Disk Drives). So, two questions. i) Is there a good reason not to do this? ii) Are there any physical layers used with NSCP other than LSI and SDB? Jnc (talk) 13:01, 30 August 2023 (CEST)

The RDxx drives are another sub-category of the MSCP main class, but I do not know the name DEC used for the physical layer - maybe we could use "MFM"?

Another (related) thought: Aren't "SDI" and "SDB" two names for the same thing? All RAxx disks are SDI and I think they're SDB, too. To me SDI is much more common than SDB so I'd prefer SDI, but I wouldn't have any serious objections to SDB either. Vaxorcist (talk) 19:30, 30 August 2023 (CEST)

I knew nothing of the later DEC disks; everything in the Standard Drive Bus article I got from the two DEC handbooks listed there. (I don't have them with me at the moment; and neither seems to be available online, alas.) But I'm fairly sure what's in that article is right; I had them right in front of me when I wrote it.

According to that, the SDB is the lower layer of both the Standard Disk Interconnect and Standard Tape Interconnect; "both add higher layer protocols which are adapted to the needs of their supported device types". So we could call them 'SDI disks'; technically, that's totally accurate - almost by definition, all the SDB disks are 'SDI disks'. And you have a good point that SDB is certainly a rare term, and SDI seems to be the more usual one. So I think it makes sense to use Category:SDI Disk Drives for the sub-category.

I don't know what the RDxx disks use for a hardware interface; I will look once the SDI disks are dealt with. MFM, as in Modified Frequency Modulation, refers to how the bits are encoded in the magnetic layer; so unless there is some other expansion of 'MFM', that is not the name of the hardware interface. Jnc (talk) 22:25, 30 August 2023 (CEST)