Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-06-10 09:47, Dave G4UGM wrote:
> Mark,
>
>    Traditional 9-track tapes are always written block-by block with a "short"
> gap between the records, WikiPedia say 0.6" for 1600BPI which sounds about
> right. From what I remember as tapes are not the most reliable medium the
> process was to have the read head after the write head so the tape could be
> read and checked as it was written. If an error was returned the "system"
> would backspace, erase the bad block to create a "long gap" and the try
> again. Looking at the first MAN page for TAR I found it says it writes
> 20x512 byte blocks so 10K blocks, i.e. about 6.4" long. That means a "waste"
> of 10% of the tape in gaps, assuming the tape is perfect.  You can write
> longer blocks but then the amount of wastage when you write a bad block goes
> up.

I don't think it really is that you have a long gap when you rewrite a 
"bad" block per se. But you get long gaps when you stop/start. And a 
rewrite implies that you will get a stop/start situation.
But in case you already were going stop/start, the gap will not be 
extended any longer.

You want to stream the tape, meaning you both get short gaps, and also 
much higher transfer rates, as the stop/start really cause the tape to 
be slow.
But for streaming mode to work, you need to feed data to the tape fast 
enough. And with that, I mean that when one block operation is finished, 
the command for the next one needs to happen very quickly, or else the 
tape will need to stop.

This also means that you do not always have a short gap with an error 
free tape. The gap size depends on whether the tape was running at speed 
or not, when the write starts.

> So I guess to answer your question. Operating systems and tools expect a
> block level interface to tapes. You need to duplicate this in your
> interface.

Yes. Just as systems expects a block level interface to disks.
The "stream of bytes" concept is in many cases an artificial construct 
handled by the OS (Unix), and not the hardware.

	Johnny

>
> Dave
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Mark J.
>> Blair
>> Sent: 10 June 2015 08:34
>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
>> Subject: Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings
>>
>> I was looking at a couple of documents describing the Pertec tape
> interface;
>> the manual for my Kennedy 9610 tape drive, and a nice reference by a
> fellow
>> with a rather familiar name:
>>
>>      http://www.sydex.com/pertec.html
>>
>> According to my Kennedy manual, issuing a read command causes the drive
>> to return one block of data. I can see how that would be used in block-
>> oriented applications in which blocks may be randomly read, written and
> re-
>> written on the tape. But most of my magtape experience has been using the
>> tapes in a streaming mode, such as when reading/writing one or more tar
>> archives separated by file marks.
>>
>> When writing a tar archive on a magtape from a Unix system, is the archive
>> written as a sequence of fixed-size blocks? Or is the entire tar archive
>> effectively written as one continuous block which must be streamed with no
>> repositioning?
>>
>> I'm curious because I'm daydreaming about how to build a tape drive
>> interface controller, and I wonder whether it might need to potentially
>> stream an entire tape in one go vs. being able to safely assume some
>> maximal block size.
>>
>> --
>> Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
>> http://www.nf6x.net/
>
>


-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol