Cartridge tape stuff

[Mike McNally]

Some cartridge tape drives support a wide variety of block sizes, some
don't.  Many only support 512-byte blocks.  Is it thus common for
archives (like tar or cpio) that are intended to be read on several
different machines to be created with a 512-byte block size?

To ask the question a different way: we have to massage our SCSI driver
to work with some drives from Archive.  The drives use QIC 24 recording
format and are thus compatible in that respect with Suns and lots of
other things.  However, we are concerned (in our general ignorance about
these things) because the drives only know about 512-byte blocks.  Is
that a problem (note that Sun uses these drives in some systems, a fact
that only makes me more confused)?  Does this here QIC 24 thing encompass
block sizes or is it just recording format?  Should I let somebody
else worry about this?

-- 
Mike McNally                                    Lynx Real-Time Systems
uucp: {voder,athsys}!lynx!m5                    phone: 408 370 2233

            Where equal mind and contest equal, go.