Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 10:41:08 +0100 (MET) From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: Simon Coggins <chaos@ultra.net.au> Subject: Re: Segate Tape stor 3200MB Message-ID: <199712200941.KAA29224@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <Pine.BSI.3.95.971220141340.21574A-100000@ultra.ultra.net.au> <199712200743.XAA28993@foo.primenet.com>
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"Bryan K. Ogawa" <bkogawa@primenet.com> wrote: > While I can't speak to the specific model you're talking about here, > generally speaking floppy tape drives are poorly supported or entirely > unsupported under FreeBSD. That's right. Further, the floppy controller hardware makes a rather poort tape interface hardware. You need to format your tape in advance into `sectors' (which takes a huge amount of time), and you're bound to the FDC clock rates that are used for floppies, thus only get the same basic speed as a floppy. In FreeBSD, currently only 500 kbps are supported as the highest rate, this yields something around 30 KB/s for a floppy disk. I doubt it will be much more for a `floppy' tape. Compare this to >100 KB/s even for the simplest SCSI drives, like an ancient Archive Viper 150, or to (180...) 300...500 KB/s for modern drives. > Most people instead recommend SCSI tape drives of some stripe or > another (Travan, 8mm, 4mm (DDS/DAT), DLT). I wouldn't even recommend any Travan tape. There have been a number of questions regarding the SCSI ones popping up in freebsd-scsi, and the net result is their SCSI firmware implementation is poor enough so you often can't call the result `SCSI' at all (since they violate things that are flagged `mandatory' in the standard). > If you're worried about price, www.corpsys.com, for example, often > sells referbished drives quite cheaply. See also Jonathan Breslers recommendation for a QIC drive in the handbook. I think it was a 1 GB drive (1.3 GB with XL cartridges), not too expensive, and damn fast. There are a number of happy campers using Tandberg drives (like me :), but these ones aren't what one would call `cheap' right away. But they are rock-solid, and that's what counted more to me. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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