hamid@optigfx.optigfx.com (Hamid Taghavi) (05/01/91)
Help... We have an application that writes directly to a 1/2" tape drive. Up to now we have used a Xylogics tape controller plugged into a VME bus slot on a SUN server. The controller provides a Pertec interface to the tape drive. We are transitioning our products to SPARCStations which do not have a VME bus. We need to support 1/2" tape drives on these machines. The Obvious answer is to use a 1/2" tape drive with a SCSI interface... But it turns out that not all the features and functions that are available on the Pertec interface are are available over SCSI... for example, from "man st": . BUGS . SPARCstation 1 does not support ... ..., nor does it support 1/2" variable record length operations, record space operations, or implied seeking. We want a *real* start-stop-tape-driver that works over SCSI, *not* one that makes a 1/2" drive look like a 1/4" streamer! Any pointers would be appreciated. Hamid Taghavi hamid@optigfx.com uunet!optigfx!hamid