Help on tape drive interoperability/reliability

[Jay Ts]

In article <53180005 at hpindda.cup.hp.com>, rajs at hpindda.cup.hp.com (Rajeev Seth) writes:
> My question is that if tar has been used to write the tapes is it sufficient
> to take the tape across to the other machines/unixes such as 386/SCO Unix,
> Sun/SunOS, Esix, etc., put it in another QIC-24 reading tape drive
> that is attached to the machine and be able to read it

I suggest using cpio with the -c option (write headers in ascii for portability)
instead of tar.  tar is often/sometimes/maybe portable, but cpio -c was written
to be so.

> Everex tech support told me that it is not good enough that two different
> tape drives/machines read/write QIC-24 because the controller card for the
> drive has some security PAL chip that attempts to make sure data is read
> back on the same machine it was archived from. Do you guys find this to be
> true with other brand drives or not?

I find that to be incredibly surprising.  If true, it is enough to make me
stop using Everex tape drives forever.  I have access to an Everex drive
(well, actually it's 160 mi. away right now) and other QIC-24 drives, so
I'll certainly try it out!

				Jay Ts
				Metran Technology
				uunet!pdn!tscs!metran!jay