Appendix A Glossary
Page 126 Seagate Travan 40 Product Manual
FCC (US) Federal Communications Commission
FILE MARK An identification block written on tape in response to a command to
“Write Filemarks.”
FLUX
TRANSITION A point on the magnetic tape which exhibits maximum free space flux
density normal to the tape surface.
FLUX
TRANSITION
SPACING
The distance on the magnetic tape between flux reversals.
FRAME A group of 128 blocks forming a complete logical group.
Gbyte or
GIGABYTE A gigabyte is one billion (1,000,000,000) bytes.
GROUP CODE
RECORDING—
GCR
A data encoding method where a group of data bits is encoded into a
group of flux transitions for recording on magnetic tape.
HOST TASKFILE
REGISTERS These are a set of addresses in the Host processor’s I/O address
space.
Devices may be controlled and queried by reading and writing to these
locations.
IDE Integrated Drive Electronics. When the first hard discs were introduced,
much of the control mechanism was in Host software. The introduction
of IDE devices moved much of that work inside the device, itself.
IDE CABLE A physical cable connecting a Host and up to two IDE devices.
Any ATA or ATAPI device may be connected to this interface.
IDE CHANNEL See IDE CABLE. This term refers more to the entire data path from
Host to the device.
IEC International Electrotechnical Commission
INTERLEAVING The process of shuffling the order of data blocks before writing them to
tape so the consecutive bytes are not recorded physically adjacent.
IO BIT Interrupt Reason register bit: Input/Output Direction. 1=Input to the
Host (Host read). 0=Output from the Host (Host write)
K or Kbyte This is a unit of storage capacity equal to 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes
depending on the context.
LED Light-emitting diode
LSI Large Scale Integration
LOAD POINT Load point marker indicating the beginning of the permissible recording
area.
MAGNETIC
TAPE An oxide or metal particle coated Mylar base tape capable of accepting
and retaining magnetically recorded information.