150Mbyte 1/4" tape drives? (v8

[Daniel Strick]

I have heard a "rumor" to the effect that these are Archive Viper 2150S
cartridge drives.  I assume there is more than one source of similar
drives (QIC-150 format) and I doubt that SMI would base a product on a
drive with only one source.

I have used the Viper 2150S with SMI, Emulex, and Interphase SCSI.  A
sun-3/60 seemed to accept the drive when the system was up and running
unix, but it refused to boot off the drive (the error messages suggested
confusion over low level SCSI protocols).  Rumor has it that SMI buys the
drive with special firmware.  A sun-4/60 seemed to like the drive just
fine, though I could not completely test booting because I didn't have a
boot tape.  The Emulex host adapter (model VH01) seemed to think that the
Viper failed to respond correctly to the synchronous transfer parameter
negotiation messages (though this did not interfere with the use of the
drive).  The Interphase adapter (model 4210) accepted the drive without
comment.  (P.S. The 3/60 ran 4.0.1 and the 4/60 ran 4.0.3c.  The Emulex
and Interphase adapters were used in a sun-4/260 running release 3.x with
a home grown driver for the scsi cards.)

Performance was good (~100 kb/sec max) with the sun-4/60, Emulex, or
Interphase host adapters.  The drive may require a few extra seconds at
the beginning of the tape to determine the tape type or the format in
which it is written or to align the heads with the tape.

The drive is capable of reading and writing in either QIC-120 or QIC-150
format.  It can read QIC-24 format and some versions of the drive are said
to read QIC-11 format.  The release 4.0.1 SMI scsi driver only seems
willing to write in QIC-150 format.  The 4.0.3 driver seems willing to
write in either QIC-150 or QIC-120.

I rather liked the drive even though 1/4" tape (the QIC formats) is not
very satisfying (old, slow, low capacity).

Dan Strick
dan at bellcore.com
bellcore!dan