Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!haven!purdue!decwrl!labrea!polya!kaufman
From: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Exabyte on a Mac
Message-ID: <6407@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 27 Jan 89 18:24:31 GMT
References: <122@grub.UUCP>
Reply-To: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Distribution: na
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 23

In article <122@grub.UUCP> sid@grub.UUCP (Sid Stuart) writes:
>I can get a good deal on a 700 meg esdi hitachi disk and an Exabyte tape
>drive from a friend of mine. I would like to put these on a Mac II, but
>don't know if I can.

>                   Integrating the Exabyte looks a little harder because one
>probably needs a driver, due to the differences between the Mac tape drive
>and the Exabyte. Has anyone ever gotten one of these working on
>a Macintosh?

A company called BlackHole Technology advertises an Exabyte for the Mac, so
they probably have a driver.  I would imagine that they want you to buy the
drive from them, however.

Tape drivers are not trivial, because Apple's SCSI support lacks the ability
to return the byte count if a READ terminates early, and because you have to
do Blind Reads and Writes to keep an Exabyte running at streaming rates
(240 KB/sec).

I am also working on a driver for the Exabyte, but in the end it will probably
be bundled with a requirement for drive purchase, also.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)