Christian Fandt <cfandt(a)servtech.com> wrote: Yes, the physical carts seem to be the same -- it's easy enough to scribble over the HCD formatting with a QIC format, at which point the tape is no longer usable in an HCD drive. So far as I know the HCD formatting must be written at the factory, and the tapes I've seen have had either HP or 3M labels on them. HP also seems to put down its own higher-level format on the tapes that it sells. Here's a story: Once upon a time the purchasing agent found she could save a few bucks ordering the 3M flavor of the tapes, and so we got one for testing. Well...on the 3000, the software for manipulating these things treats them as serial discs (which is exactly as wacky as it sounds, the tape drive is a CS/80 device and so the tapes are addressed by block), and so you're supposed to use the VINIT tool to format the "disc" and "serialize" it (i.e. write a volume label that says "this is a serial disc" for auto-volume recognition to read later). So what I noticed in my tests was that the 3M tape, when new, took 15 minutes for the FORMAT step, vs. the HP tapes which took seconds. I suspect that the time was taken by the tape drive formatting the tape and writing out the canonical CS/80 stuff like bad-block sparing tables and so forth, and that HP does this at their factory. -Frank McConnell