[Info-vax] Exabyte tapes to disk

[Bob Koehler]

In article <5221bd40-7b18-4793-89ca-7554b861dea2 at v15g2000prn.googlegroups.com>, jbriggs444 <jbriggs444 at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> You ever hear the VAX Magic trick of "dual density mag tape"?  Guy had
> a reel that had a data set at 1600 BPI when read on one drive and a
> different data set at 800 BPI when read on another.  Much hair-pulling
> ensued.

   I had worse.  I had one tape drive that loaded the tape and searched
   forward for the stripe.  It saw 1600 BPI data.  Another loaded the
   tape and searched backward for the stripe, it saw 6250 BPI data.
   I checked and the head to stripe distance was different on the
   drives.

   Which would not have been a problem, had we bothered to deguass the
   tape before writing the 6250 BPI data.  But my customer could only
   see the 1600 BPI stuff and his drive did not switch to 6250 when
   it started getting read errors.