On Mar 21, 2012, at 1:30 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
One could put on a 2MB-8MB buffer, read as many blocks
as fit, then
disgorge to the host, then repeat. Because the usual interface is
just an async serial port, it will take some time between "runs", but
it would be less stress on the media and the drive to be able to
handle many blocks vs start-stop operation.
I'll say it would take a while. To get stuff onto tape with my 11/23
(which still doesn't have a proper operating system despite my best
efforts), I wrote a little serial receiver program that writes to the
tape. At 19200 baud (the max for the KDF-11's built-in port), it
took a few hours to write the 2.9BSD tape, which was around 20MB.
- Dave