QIC cartridge tape compatibility

none The original QIC-11 and QIC-24 formats do a full width erase on the first track written. There are many QIC standards. 11 and 24 are the original on-tape format specs, with differing numbers of tracks. QIC-36 is the unformatted drive interface, QIC-02 was an intelligent interface that was quickly replaced by SCSI. Most converters were for QIC-36 to SCSI. Very early Sun systems used QIC-02 to SASI converters, but they switched to Emulex QIC-36 to SCSI adapters before going to embedded SCSI controllers on the 150mb archive drives. Unfortunately, the QIC web site doesn't have many of the early standards, you have to look at the specs for the drives or host adapters. I have heard that HP 914x 16 and 32 track drives used 3M CAPAMAT format, as did Apple's 40 meg tape drive, and require formatted tapes. I beleive the HP tapes are wound backwards as well.