[Info-vax] Exabyte tapes to disk

[Bart Zorn]

On Sep 4, 3:10 pm, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
> In article <h7p8ht$mg... at naig.caltech.edu>, glen herrmannsfeldt <g... at ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
>
> > It was not unusual to get two different densities on IBM systems.
> > When you write a tape, you specify the density you want.  First
> > the system verifies the label, in which case the drive adapts to
> > the density.  Then it skips existing files, again at the density
> > they were written at.  (It probably can find tape marks without
> > actually looking at the data, but it does have to read the label.)
> > Then new data is written at the specified density.
>
>    I guess I never really tried, but I was never aware of any tape
>    drive that would actually change densities in the middle of a tape.
>
>    I do know that some DLT drives will turn compression on/off in
>    the middle of the tape.  I've verified this on TLZ06.  And I think
>    an engineer decided that was an "oops".

Uhmm... A TLZ06 is a 4mm DAT drive, not a DLT!

Bart Zorn