[DECtec] [HECnet] TK50 issues

[Clem Cole]

Hans Vlems asks:   What's wrong with it?

I have had a number of Exabyte units over the years on UNIX systems.   I still have at least one of each 8200 and 8500.      I always found them to be reliable and if you used data style cartridges (not the video ones) very reliable and the standard BSD tape utilities and drivers support them.    The biggest issue I had with them is feeding them:    when writing to them, they can consume data faster than many applications can source it and "data late" caused "bad things" to happen on the tape firmware.      For UNIX, years before I had written a program called double DD which was modeled after a program of the same name from Europe (the original was two cooperating processes that hand off control back and forth over a pipe].   My version used multiple threads to over lap the I/O and thus reduce if not remove the data late errors.   [I used to the same program for QIC tapes too on the Sun systems we had].   

So a tar command line would look like:
              tar cvf - . | ddd ibs=20b obs=256K of=/dev/rmt0


Clem