Re: heads-up about SCSI tape drives

[Bill Wohler <wohler@uluru.worldtalk.com>]

"Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@sgk.tiac.net> writes:
> Suggestion:  if you have a SCSI tape drive, you might wish to check that 
> you can read from it, and/or you might wish to upgrade your kernel.

  Here's a data point: I didn't have any problems reading my Exabyte
  SCSI drive with 2.0.0 last night when I upgraded my home box to 1.1.5.

  One thing to think about is the blocksize.  If you've run "mt -f
  /dev/st0 setblk 0" (which is good for reading tapes written by SunOS
  and AIX I have found) you won't be able read tapes written with the
  default block size (whatever that is) and vice-versa.

  I haven't done any performance tests to compare the effects of
  different block sizes but would be interested to hear from others
  who have (I use tar for backups).

Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>

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