"Keith G. Murphy" wrote:
>
> Wolfgang Weisselberg wrote:
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > Trying to kill the keyboard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] produced:
> > > > > drives any more, so I'm wondering if there is a
> > > > > new drive with larger capacity which will read the
> > > > > data off their old Travan 1.6/3.2 tape, and which
> > > > > functions well under Linux. Any suggestions? I
> >
> > > My tapes are QIC-3020, and yes, I think I'll go
> > > for an 8Mb TR4 drive, from Seagate or Aiwa, and an
> > > SCSI controller.
> >
> > Note that TR-4 cannot read TR-1, TR-2 nor TR-3 formats ---
> > they are completely unrelated apart from being QIC tapes.[1]
> > So essentially, you cannot upgrade and still expect to read your
> > old tapes. Sorry.
> >
> Mmmm, that's not what Aiwa and Seagate say about their TR4 drives - they
> say they can read QIC-3010 and QIC-3020. In my own experience, my new
> AIWA TR4 can read an old QIC-3020 tape I have somewhat (I can see the
> files in the BRU listing), but with nasty errors. However, that tape
> and the (Eagle Exabyte) TR3 tape drive were having problems, so the tape
> may not be up-to-snuff. (I had unfortunately destroyed the Eagle drive
> before I could make any more backups, but I won't go into how I did that
> :-b) The format itself may be "unrelated", but that surely doesn't mean
> you can't manufacture a drive that can read both...
The main issue here is that the software used MUST understand the
QIC-117 tape format. While the drives use similar technology, the
device drivers need to under stand both the QIC-157 and QIC-117/123
formats. Currently, the Linux drivers don't offer this and probably
won't in the near future.
--
Tim Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Vice President Visit our tape backup web pages:
Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc. http://www.estinc.com/
