For normal volumes, CCHHR where each letter is 8 bits.
For EAV volumes this is defined to x'ccccCCChrr'' where each letter is 4
bits.
rr = x'00'- x'FF'
H 'x'0' - x'e' (since 3390s have 15 heads).
CCCcccc is the cylinder number,
with CCC=x'000' (non-eav 1 to 64K cylinders 56GB)
to 00F (800GB EAV) and the cccc is x'0000' - x'ffff'' 0 to 64K tracks

On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 7:44 PM Paul Edwards <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I am interested in the "artificial device" described on page 330 here:
>
> https://publib.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dgt2u140.pdf
>
> (for use by iebcopy).
>
> I am actually interested in PDSes, not PDSE, but I would
> expect that an artificial device is the same either way, and
> that I could use it for a PDS too.
>
> It is defined as:
>
> 65536 cylinders
> 256 tracks (heads)
> and the tracks are 16M bytes, which means that regardless
> of the blocksize, you can fit 255 records in it.
>
> According to that page, it is subject to limits described here:
>
> https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/SSLTBW_3.1.0/pdf/idad400_v3r1.pdf
>
> But I'm not sure which page is relevant.
>
> I see limits on page number 41, but that's 16 MB for a single disk.
>
> This artificial machine can do that in a single track!
>
> What I'm interested in is why the number of heads is limited to 256.
>
> I normally see CCHHR - so that should mean 65536 heads, the
> same limit as the cylinders.
>
> Any idea why the heads on an artificial machine are only 256,
> and whether that is documented as suggested by page 330
> of the first manual?
>
> Thanks. Paul.
>
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-- 
Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?

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