Gregory Propf wrote:
>
> Looks like the compression command is only for SCSI tapes.
Yes it seems so. Are you sure your floppy drive _uses_ hardware
compression? The ftape manual does not provide an MTIOCTL for hardware
compression, from which I deduce that there is no need for it.
> The scheme
> for using floppy tapes is a little goofy under Linux.
Claus-Justus Heine, the ftape maintainer, has put a great deal of work
in making floppy tapes have an mt interface that looks as close as
possible to the SCSI one. You load the modules and use mt to access the
tape as usual. What is "goofy" about this?
> The best advice
> is "Don't use floppy tapes". They truly are crap. Mine is slow, runs
> hot and makes all sorts of wheezing sounds while it runs.
Well, again it depends: mine is fast, not hot at all, not loud at all.
It is more silent than under Windows, because it _streams_. I didn't
really know why streamers are called that way, until I switched from
Windows to Linux. Then I realized that what I thought was "normal
operation" for my drive, it was close to "shoe-shining", compared to its
operation under Linux: when the drive really streams, it is silent. When
it cannot be fed fast enough with data, it "shoe-shines", producing
these annoying sounds.
I use an FC-20 floppy controller. There is also a floppy controller on
Adaptec's 1542CF ISA SCSI card (I think). Try to get an FC-20, it should
be a bargain nowadays. It is supported by ftape (although not in DMA
5,6,7, due to the lack of documentation by the manufacturer). This will
make your drive fast enough - you don't need a Ferrari for backups, they
can take as long as they like, it suffices that they are done by the
next day. And I backup 8GB of a network on a 14 day dumpcycle using 3M's
650MB floppy tapes (MC3000XL) and "best" software compression on AMANDA
with *no* problems.
> I guess I
> should break down and buy a SCSI. Anyone have any advice on a good low
> cost SCSI tape?
And I thought you would stay in the AMANDA floppy tape club... ;-)
--
Regards
Chris Karakas
Don´t waste your cpu time - crack rc5: http://www.distributed.net
