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!hamidhue@island.COM (Pond Scum) (05/04/91)
In article <360@optigfx.optigfx.com> hamid@optigfx.optigfx.com (Hamid Taghavi) writes: >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": Try 4.1.1. There is no mention of being unable to deal with variable sized records in the man page of st, so maybe the restriction is gone. We had an HP-88780 1/2" SCSI tape drive hooked up to a SPARCstation 2 and it worked fine, but our application always knew what size records it was reading. -Jonathan hue@island.COM