Wayne Johnson wrote:

I just bought a Tecmar Travan NS20 IDE tape drive. Took me a while to figure out that I should use the IDE-SCSI shim to get it to work.
One question. There are 4 modes for the driver, tied to device names /dev/st0, /dev/st0l, /dev/st0m, and /dev/st0a. Anyone know what the different modes are? I would guess that one is with compression on. Anyone know which does what?
I've started running typetype, but if the research I found is true, it'll take 5 hours for each device type.
Thanks.

From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt:

/dev/st0 First SCSI tape, mode 0
/dev/st0l First SCSI tape, mode 1
/dev/st0m First SCSI tape, mode 2
/dev/st0a First SCSI tape, mode 3

My understanding from having had to research this in the past:
/dev/st0 - normal rewinding tape device
/dev/st0l - normal rewinding, block density as defined in <sys/mtio.h> or by /etc/stinit
/dev/st0m - normal rewinding compressed device
/dev/st0a - normal rewinding, drive buffer as defined in <sys/mtio.h> or by /etc/stinit

You can get this info (hopefully) by doing a 'man st' and reading through <sys/mtio.h>.

You should also have the sam non-rewinding tape devices (/dev/nst0,...). On most systems I've only ever seen /dev/st0 and /dev/nst0. The other devices would have had to havee been created manually using mknod. On some systems the no-rewind device is /dev/st0n.

Note: On some systems the different modes can be defined in the file /dev/stinit.
Note: I'm not absolutely certain about the l and a components.

=G=



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