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From: billsey@nesbbx.UUCP (Bill Seymour)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: A3090 tape driver ??(Re: BTN 2.0 Tape handler)
Message-ID: <191121cd.ARN0074@nesbbx.UUCP>
Date: 30 Apr 91 20:19:25 GMT
References: <1991Apr13.014520.13657@sugar.hackercorp.com> <61897@masscomp.westford.ccur.com>
 <5692@media-lab.media.mit.edu.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: billsey@nesbbx.UUCP
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Organization: NES, Inc.
Lines: 57

In article <5692@media-lab.media.mit.edu.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>, Masaru Sugai writes:
: 
: I've been frustrated with my A3090 (C= 150MB QIC) I picked up yesterday. 
: I hooked it up to A3000/16, and was easy to take a full backup of WORK: 
: using BRU w/o any problems.  All I had to do were moving tape: entry
: to the top of BRUtab file, then "bru -c" at the root directory. That's it.
: 
: Encouraged with this success, I then tried TAR+MWtape from fish #440s, and
: it ruined my Saturday night!  I had to check several FTP sites, CIS, and BIX
: to get ARP mount command which MWtape requires, but no avail.
: 
: I gave up MWtape and went to BTN.  BTN seems quite useful, especially its
: tapemon tool is wonderful as it shows what's going on in tape drives.
: But there are several glitches.
: 
:   - I could store and restore files only when I set tape buffer to 512B long.
:     Buuut, it's slow (say, 15KB/sec) and consumes most of tape for block gaps!
:     Nearly 80% of tape has used to just save 30MB.
: 
:   - With buffer size over 1024B or more, TAR seems to write all data on tape.
:     Archiving speed is around 90KB/sec when I set buffer size to 64KB, 
:     acceptable performance, judging from A3090 transfer rate (112.5KB/sec).
:     This is an option for a write-only mode, though.  I can read, say, first
:     megs, but as soon as I hit upon a large file (a few hudred kilobytes),
:     TAR quits with Tapemon's "SELECTION TIMEOUT ERROR" message.  I am better
:     off than they are, as I am free from lockup and guru SO FAR.
:     
: I know what BTN stands for, but it is a decent implementation of tape 
: driver on standard Amiga configuration. It would be a BTA with a little
: bit more of error handling... Any idea ?

	Here's my mountlist entry for BTNtape: on my 3000:

BTNTAPE:
	Handler = l:btntape-handler
	Priority = 5
	Mount = 1
	Stacksize = 4000
	GlobVec = -1
	Startup = "scsi.device/UN-3/BS-512/NB-128/BT-1"
#

	This gives me reasonable performance, even though the numbers were
just guesses originally. My guess is you have something wrong on the Amiga
side with reselection. The tape streams constantly on large files and only
does a start/stop when dealing with many small files. I'm using TAR (The one
that is 33860 bytes in length and has the patch to allow for UNIX compatibility.)

: -- Masaru Sugai
: 
: -- Masaru Sugai:Use disclaimer. CIS 72050,2141:NeXT + A3000 = money-eater
: NEC Corporation:sugai@ccs.mt.nec.co.jp DORMANT:hardwired logic,machine language
: MIT R.Affiliate:masaru@media-lab.media.mit.edu:  "Silicon on Sapphire" by CLASH
  -Bill Seymour     nesbbx!billsey@agora.uucp or nesbbx!billsey@agora.rain.com
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