Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

Al Kossow aek at bitsavers.org
Wed Jun 10 10:46:36 CDT 2015


On 6/10/15 8:15 AM, Mark J. Blair wrote:

> And that is precisely why I'm thinking of an ad-hoc interface rather than just plugging a SCSI drive into a UNIX box.

It also has the advantage that you can return the CRC/checksum and partially read blocks. Most SCSI tape drives don't
return the data if the read doesn't succeed. Some drives have a seismic mode for dealing with oil exploration tapes
which returns anything read, but it has it's own set of problems (it will happily return garbage if the density doesn't
match)




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