Cartridge tape questions

[Matt Reedy]

I'm confused about quarter-inch cartridge tape drives.  I read that there are
40MB, 60MB, 120MB, & 150MB tape drives.  I read about "standards" like QIC-24
and QIC-40.  I hear that some are SCSI, some aren't.  I know about tape
cartridges like DC300A, DC300XL/P, DC600A and so on.  I hear that some tape
drives can read tapes created on other, different capacity drives.  I know
that sometimes you have to swap bytes when loading tapes made on different 
drives.  And then there's my AT&T 3B2 machine that uses a "streaming" tape
that must be formatted before it can be written to.

Can someone fill out a table like the following for me to help me understand
this quagmire?  Many thanks in advance.

   Tape Drive   SCSI or     QIC       Type of    Can read      Swap
   Capacity       NOT    Standard?   Cartridge   tapes sized   bytes?

My real reason for asking is that we want to get a quarter-inch tape drive for
a 386 *NIX machine that is as portable as possible (i.e., we'd like to be able
to make tapes on this machine that can be read on the widest possible variety
of other *NIX machines).

matt
-- 
Matthew Reedy                 UUCP: cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!dpmizar!iquery!matt
Programmed Intelligence Corp.
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