SCSI tape drive

[vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry)]

I got ahold of a SCSI DAT tape drive to be used for backing up a couple of
UNIX systems. But I decided to try it out on my GS for fun :-) These are the
results:

I used the RAMFast firmware utility to back up my hard drive and that went
really well. Very good transfer rate. A lot better than stupid IDE which only
allows one device to be active at a time!

Then I mounted the backups just to see how slow it would be.

If you ever wonder whether or not your RAMFast and GS/OS caches are doing
their jobs, just mount volumes on a tape drive. You'll be able to tell the
difference between cached blocks and blocks that must be fetched from tape! :-)

I was disapointed that the system was halted completely while reading blocks
from tape, but there's not much one can do about that. If GS/OS has to take
a long time to read a block, it has to, and nothing else can run while a
GS/OS call is in progress.

Next thing: If I tried to access the second partition on the tape
(corresponding to the second partition on my hard drive), the system would
spontaneously reboot! This even happened sometimes just when using "df" to
get online volumes.

Finally, I was unable to eject the tape. I unmounted both partitions, but
the tape didn't come out.

I suspect that the previous two problems are caused by old ROMs on the
RAMFast. I don't know which I have, but my docs are dated May 22, 1991.

-Phil