braun@m10ux.UUCP (04/02/87)
I just bought (at the Computer Swap America in San Jose last weekend) an Ampex Megastore host adapter card for the IBM PC. This device is (apparently) a SCSI host adapter designed by Ampex, which was sold as part of an add-on hard disk system for PC's. I would like to use this as a general-purpose SCSI controller for disks and tapes, but I have no documentation for it, other that a floppy that has formatting utilities for a hard disk. Does anyone have the entire system, or any description of the hardware I bought? I suppose I could plug a generic SCSI controller and drive into it, and run the program on the disk, but I really would like to use it for more than that. If I give up on this, can anyone recommend a good SCSI host adapter to buy (that has good documentation, device drivers, etc.)? I also purchased a Memtec model 420/90 tape drive, along with a SCSI controller. This stores 20MB on a tape that looks like an audio cassette, and fits in a 1/2 height floppy mounting space. It works great (but not on a PC yet). My questions about this are: Has anyone seen the cassettes it uses advertised anywhere? They look like audio cassettes, but without a pressure pad opposite the head opening. They must be certified for 1000 FPTI. Also, is there any PD software that could be used with this to do file-by-file backups, etc? Ideally, I would like something like tar, that I could link to my own driver routines for this drive. Any wisdom about tape backup systems would also be appreciated. -- Doug Braun AT+T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ m10ux!braun 201 582-7039