Xref: utzoo comp.periphs:2212 comp.unix.questions:17266
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!witold
From: witold@cs.washington.edu (Witold Paluszynski)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Cartridge tape questions
Message-ID: <9633@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 29 Oct 89 22:56:13 GMT
References: <169@iquery.UUCP>
Reply-To: witold@june.cs.washington.edu (Witold Paluszynski)
Organization: University of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 25
Keywords: QIC tape cartridge

In article <169@iquery.UUCP> matt@iquery.UUCP (Matt Reedy) writes:
>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
> ...
>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).

Well, there appears to be lots of QIC standards but the answer to
this question is simple: they are generally INCOMPATIBLE.  I was
recently shopping for a quarter inch drive with similar objectives
(compatibility with other systems) and I was amazed to discover
that 60 MB drives were incompatible with 150 MB drives.  Yes, you
can read a 60 MB tape in a 150 MB drive, but you can't write it.

What I would expect is the sort of upwards compatibility as with
9 track tapes, where even the newest drives can write 800 bpi tapes.
I guess the manufacturers have discovered that with that much
compatibility people just keep using their old drives instead of
replacing them with new ones all the time.  So they were careful to
prevent this kind of disaster by designing incompatible standards.

I hope someone can prove me wrong.
Witold