From: bjl@pttrnl.nl (Ben Lippolt) Subject: Re: Colorado tape drives. Compatibility? Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1992 05:51:40 GMT
james@netcom.com (James L. Paul) writes:
>I've been considering a tape drive for basic backups. The cheapest units
>I'm aware of are the Colorado 120 and 250 MB units.
>Assuming I can connect one of these tape drives to the avilable floppy
>connector, what /dev driver would I use? (What are the major/minor
>numbers, and is it a block device or what?)
As far as I know there is no driver available for the Colorado's (yet?).
I have the DJ 120 and as soon as Linux came out I asked if there were
sources or technical specs for it. No luck! It seems that CMS is not
eager to let anyone know how to make drivers for their drives. The drives
should be QIC-40/80 drives, but I also heard that they are not completely
compatible. I also dimly recall that there are drivers for tape-drives
in BSD386. Maybe there is one for Colorado?
BTW: Is someone working on a driver for the Colorado?
>Since the current filesystem size is limited to 64MB, is there a
>advantage to getting a 120 MB tape instead of a 250 MB? Can I put more
>that one tar to the tape from Linux?
The limit on the filesystem will changed (soon I hope), so if you get one,
get the 250 MB. BTW, this 250 MB is not really 250 MB. It is actually
125 MB, but with compression you can put approx. 250 MB on a tape.
Ben Lippolt.