hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) (01/20/90)
I picked up a free computer magazine here called "Microtimes" and a place called HSC Electronic Suppy has 3M MCD 403 SCSI tape drives for $129. They are new and in their original boxes. They take DC2000 cartridges and hold 40MB. If these are the drives I'm thinking of, they are ridiculously slow, something like 22K/sec, but at $129 they look pretty good. I think Apple sells these drives as Mac peripherals. Anyway, is it worth buying one of these to use with my A590? Will Commodore support a generic SCSI tape drive soon? Is it possible for me to write a program that talks to scsi.device to write to the tape drive? -Jonathan (bargain stuff hunter)
roadman@portia.Stanford.EDU (arthur walker) (01/21/90)
In article <5841@netcom.UUCP>, hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) writes: > > I picked up a free computer magazine here called "Microtimes" and a place > called HSC Electronic Suppy has 3M MCD 403 SCSI tape drives for $129. > They are new and in their original boxes. They take DC2000 cartridges > and hold 40MB. If these are the drives I'm thinking of, they are ridiculously > slow, something like 22K/sec, but at $129 they look pretty good. I think > Apple sells these drives as Mac peripherals. > > Anyway, is it worth buying one of these to use with my A590? Will Commodore > support a generic SCSI tape drive soon? Is it possible for me to write > a program that talks to scsi.device to write to the tape drive? I don't know if the current or future drivers for the 590 will support SCSIdirect.h. If so, and if SCSIdirect.h doesn't presuppose a SCSI block size of 512 bytes, then you will be able to do it. The drives are indeed slow, but have the advantage of being block-addressable rather than streaming, which means that if you can find a disk driver source you are going to have an easy time of it and the resulting drive will fit into the amiga scheme quite nicely. I am led to believe by the makers of a mac backup utility called Retrospect that the 3M tape supports disconnect/reselect; the mac SCSI manager does not, however, which means you pretty much can't multi-find while doing backups or more infuriatingly, tape formatting. The Dantz people got tired of waiting for 7.0 and wrote a disconnecting SCSI managerjust to use with Retrospect. If you write such a driver, please let me know. I am using the tape drive on a SCSI bus shared by am amiga and a mac II, with (sigh - it was highly configurable for its time!) a C LTD controller, whose last set of drivers gave some public access to the SCSI bus, but only for 512 bye blocks. For now, the mac thinks the amiga partitions are A/UX partitions and lets me do image backups; I'd like to be able to do more than inquire from the amiga, and I expect that someday I'll have an amiga SCSI host that supports SCSIdirect. art walker roadman@portia.stanford.edu walker@meggie.stanford.edu
roadman@portia.Stanford.EDU (arthur walker) (01/21/90)
I see that I left out the important detail about he 3M tapes: at the SCSI level they are 8k in length. This means the disk driver strategy routine has to block and unblock 8k to 512, which combined with the slow random access, means that the driver itself should cache a lot of data if one's desire is to provide a workable disk-like interface for general filesystem applications. In the mac world, this is facilitated by the desktop file, which can be cached - in our metaphor, it probably makes sense to write not just a driver, but eventually a filesystem that uses 8k blocks. art walker roadman@portia.stanford.edu
tron1@tronsbox.UUCP (HIM) (01/22/90)
>Item: 4085 by *Masked* at netcom.UUCP >Author: [Jonathan Hue] > Subj: Should I buy a cheap SCSI tape drive? > Keyw: > Date: Sat Jan 20 1990 22:20 > Lines: 13 > > >I picked up a free computer magazine here called "Microtimes" and a place >called HSC Electronic Suppy has 3M MCD 403 SCSI tape drives for $129. >They are new and in their original boxes. They take DC2000 cartridges >and hold 40MB. If these are the drives I'm thinking of, they are ridiculous ly >slow, something like 22K/sec, but at $129 they look pretty good. I think >Apple sells these drives as Mac peripherals. Hmm.. what is the phone number of this place? **************************************************************************** Everything I say is Copr. 1990, except the stuff I stole from someone else and the stuff I don't want responsibility for. Kenneth J. Jamieson: Xanadu Enterprises Inc. "Professional Amiga Software" UUCP: tron1@tronsbox.UUCP BEST PATH ---> uunet!tronsbox!tron1 Sysop, Romantic Encounters BBS - (201)759-8450 / (201)759-8568 ****************************************************************************
hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) (01/23/90)
In article <25ba90ef:4085.3comp.sys.amiga;1@tronsbox.UUCP> tron1@tronsbox.UUCP (HIM) writes: >Hmm.. what is the phone number of this place? The place with the $129 QIC-100 drives is: HSC Electronic Supply 3500 Ryder Street Santa Clara, CA 95051 (408) 732-1573 Toll Free (Orders only, out of state) (800) 4-HALTED I was there Saturday and bought one. They have about twenty left. They don't have docs, but expect to get have them this week. I bought a formatted DC2000 cartridge ($19.95 at Fry's, ouch!) tried it out on a Mac and it worked fine. I figure that if I can't ever get it to work with my Amiga, I can throw it in a box with a power supply and sell it to some Mac feeb for what it cost me. -Jonathan