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From: steve2@genesis.nred.ma.us (Steve Gerakines)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce
Subject: QIC-40/80 tape driver for FreeBSD
Followup-To: poster
Date: 7 Nov 1993 03:44:19 -0800
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Message-ID: <9311060621.AA24065@genesis.nred.ma.us>
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The latest version of my QIC-40/80 floppy tape driver is now available at
ftp.gte.com:/pub/ft/dist0.3/dist0.3.tgz. This release includes support for
the newer floppy driver with FreeBSD. As I type this I'm using X/olwm with
minicom in one window and a full system save cranking in another, so response
time can't be _that_ bad. :-)
Here's a piece from the README file:
QIC-40/80 floppy tape driver for FreeBSD
Steve Gerakines <steve2@genesis.nred.ma.us>
10/30/93 v0.3
Introduction
============
This the latest cumulative version of my QIC-40/80 floppy tape driver.
The driver supports tape drives such as the Colorado Jumbo, Mountain
Summit Express, some Archive/Conner models, and probably many others.
These tape drives attach between your floppy disk controller card and
your existing floppy disks' ribbon cable. This driver does not currently
support attachments via a proprietary tape controller card or by the
parallel port.
QIC-40/80 drives have become extremely popular, mostly because of their
capacity and cheap price. To clarify some of the mystery behind them,
here are a few of their pro's and cons.
First the cons. They are more CPU intensive than a SCSI drive. This is
really only a factor if your machine is networked or has multiple concurrent
users. For personal use (i.e. your typical home Unix user), response time
is perfectly acceptable. The tape drives cannot detect write errors.
Instead, they make up for it by using CRC's, error correction, and bad
spot mapping. Formatting time is extremely long because of this. The
drive makes a first pass over the entire tape writing out sectors. It
then makes a second pass at a slower rate than usual (for sensitivity)
to detect bad spots on the tape. Typically it takes an hour to format
a single QIC-80 (120Mb uncompressed) tape.
Now for the good news. A QIC-80 drive can hold 250Mb of compressed data
(or more depending on what type of tape is used). A QIC-40 drive can
hold 120Mb compressed. Since the drive itself is fairly dumb and you use
your existing floppy disk controller for the interface, the prices are much
lower compared to other drives. (Good for your wallet, painful for the
programmer. :-)) Backup and restore speeds are good. As long as the error
correction being used, backups are also very reliable.
What You Get
============
Here's what's included in this package:
o The FreeBSD floppy tape driver for your kernel. QIC-40 and 80 drive
will be detected upon boot. New ioctl()'s to control the drives.
Tested with epsilon and 1.0 release.
o A set of user tools:
ftinfo - display drive and tape information
ftfilt - a backup/restore filter to save your system
getseg - a program to read and write segments out to a file
postest - read random segments
rdtest - read a range of segments and report results
wrtest - write a test pattern and check the results
o A preliminary QIC-40/80 compatible backup command (qtar). Currently it
will only display a tape's contents.
What the driver cannot do yet:
o Formatting/Verifying is in the works. You will need to use your
existing backup program to do this for the time being.
o Error correction is not as robust as I'd like.
o The "qtar" program is under construction and is the big focus of my
work. I have made progress with this since v0.2, but I have not
rolled the enhancements into this release.
If you're using a prior version of the ft driver, here's what's new:
o FreeBSD and new floppy disk driver support
o Added the ftinfo command
o Added driver support to retrieve hardware information
o Whacked a couple of driver bugs.
--
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