On Monday 13 May 2002 21:06, you wrote:
> I know some here have played with sun stuff, so, does any one know
> anything about sun 370-2176 DDS-2 tape drives?
>
> Info in the 'net seems very very sparse. Does anyone *know* whether it
> will work happily with linux or not?
I attached a Sun DDS-2 drive, they were known as the 'Archive Python', where
Archive were name of manufacturer. I don't know about those numbers
370-2176, not the kind of thing I keep on top of head.
If it's same drive (standard Sun DDS drive 5GB compressed), then I have tried
using one with Linux 2.2. I could get system to talk to it, but even using
the 126 512 byte blocking factor I could not obtain reasonable performance,
and gave up on directly attaching the device, choosing to backup over net
instead.
Unfotunately SCSI tape commands weren't standardised early on so there's
variety of tape and tape driver architectures. The only company to implement
the CAM standard which would have helped simplify the situation, should it
have been widely implemented, was Digital in VMS, Ultrix and their OSF/1
implementations.
Kurtis Preston's book on UNIX Backup and Archiving, mentions that the Linux
tape driver architecture is 'unfortunately' not CAM based and different to
all others, meaning that compatability problems are possible. Though I
believe that there are few problems with currently available drives. which
probably support all the commands used by modern drivers.
Rob
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