On 8/17/2016 2:38 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 08/17/2016 11:07 AM, j...@cimmeri.com wrote:
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.
Well, let's get to the nub of things--exactly what commands aren't
supported in each particular drive? At a minimum, they should all
provide a response to an "IDENTIFY" command.
Hi, Chuck. Excellent question -- and they do respond per your minimum, but
beyond that, I'm not sure. When a drive wouldn't work, I only thought to check
for unit ready, unit identify, and to see what would happen with a START or
STOP unit command.
Even the Teac MT-2ST would respond to those 3 (for the START or STOP command, it
retensions the entire tape). Interestingly, the Teac also doesn't provide a unit name
like all the others do eg. "ARCHIVE PYTHON etc..." It just shows up as a
blank during bootup on a PC with an Adaptec SCSI card. This lack of name seems to make
it invisible to Windows (XP) ASPI.
I have MSDOS software than allows one to issue direct SCSI commands, but doing
that is beyond my present know-how.
Thank you-
-John
6-byte CDBs for read and write are probably supported across all drives
as well, though there are some cases of special "flags".
REWIND should be supported and possibly SPACE commands. After that,
it's a craps shoot. Not everyone adhered to the ANSI spec.
Back when I was writing forensic tools, I had to deal with a wide range
of SCSI drives. I quickly learned to pare my command set down to a
minimum and how to deal gracefully with unsupported features.
Andy Johnson-Laird used to refer to "SCSI Voodoo" and he wasn't far off
the mark.
--Chuck
