Real 1/2" mag tape for Sun Sparcs

[Hamid Taghavi]

We have an application that writes directly to a 1/2" tape drive.  Up to
now we have used a Xylogics tape controller plugged into a VME bus slot on
a SUN server.  The controller provides a Pertec interface to the tape
drive.  We are transitioning our products to SPARCStations which do not
have a VME bus.  We need to support 1/2" tape drives on these machines.
The Obvious answer is to use a 1/2" tape drive with a SCSI interface, but
it turns out that not all the features and functions that are available on
the Pertec interface are are available over SCSI: for example, from "man
st": 

BUGS: SPARCstation 1 does not support ...  ...,  nor  does it support 1/2"
variable record length operations, record space operations, or implied
seeking.

We want a *real* start-stop-tape-driver that works over SCSI, *not* one
that makes a 1/2" drive look like a 1/4" streamer!

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Hamid Taghavi
hamid at optigfx.com
uunet!optigfx!hamid