wjr@uunet.uu.net (Bill Richard) (01/19/89)
coherent!celeste@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Celeste C. Stokely) writes: >Like everyone else, I want to buy an Exabyte tape drive. A vendor just >told me of a hitch, though. He says that tapes written under any driver >he's found for SunOS 3.5 can NOT be read under SunOS 4.0!... According to the Exabyte EXB-800 installation manual there are two significant changes to SCSI tape operations under SunOS 4.0. The maximum blocking factor is now 126 and variable block mode is now the default. It goes on to say that to ensure compatibility tapes written on 3.x systems should have blocking factors <= 126 and when reading 3.x tape on a 4.0 system you should expilicitly specify the same blocking factor with which the tape was written to force a read in fixed block mode. Please note: We just got our exabyte yesterday. I have not yet installed it on our system and have no pratical experience with tape compatibility between SunOSes. Like Will Rogers almost said, "All I know is what I read in the manuals." --Bill