Hi, folks.
I'm experimenting with various old
SCSI tape drives to see which
will work with my PDP-11/34 with an
Emulex SCSI card.
To my surprise, not all SCSI tape
drives are created equal. I
was under the mistaken assumption that
all SCSI tape drives would
pretty much be abstracted the same way
by the SCSI interface.
Drives that are working fine are:
- Archive Python DAT
- Exabyte 8mm
- Cipher 995 9 track
- any of the DEC branded DLT drives
Drives that aren't recognized are:
- Teac MT-2ST (this drive seems
completely nonstandard -- can't
even use it as an ASPI
drive under MSDOS)
- OnStream Advanced Digital Recording
(ADR) SC-30 (doesn't
work under MSDOS /
ASPI either, but does work
under Windows 98(!)
with a special driver.
Won't work under WinXP
with same driver.
- Quantum branded DLT drives (work
fine under MSDOS / ASPI)
Question: So, even though some tape
drives physically have a SCSI
interface, are they different in some
other way such as to require
special software to use them? Or maybe
there were different
SCSI standards? Or is the standard
simply imperfect?
Any commentary, appreciated. Thank you.
- John
