Adding tape drives

Adding tape drives

You can add EIDE and SCSI tape drives. It is also possible to have one QIC-02 cartridge tape drive plus one Irwin mini-cartridge, one QIC-40, or one QIC-80 drive configured on a system.

When installing a SCSI tape drive, you must use a SCSI host adapter that is supported by SCO OpenServer. Refer to the SCO Certified and Compatible Hardware web page (CHWP) for a listing of supported host adapters and drives. You should also verify with your hardware supplier that the drive will work with the host adapter. See ``New features in this release'' for information about supported mass storage drivers.

Using the tape device

The tape(C) utility allows you to perform various tape control functions (such as rewind, erase, format, retension, and so on) if they are supported by the device. Access to tape drives is via character (raw) special device files only; there is no block device access. A no-rewind device exists for writing multiple tape archives to a single QIC-02 or SCSI tape.

You can also use tape compression, partitioning, and variable block size with SCSI tape drives that support these features.

Generic and specific tape support

The tape(HW) manual page describes generic support for tape drives. The manual pages listed below contain specific information about each type of tape drive:

Compaq CPQS: cpqs(HW)
Irwin: irwin(HW)
QIC-02: cartridge(HW)
QIC-40/80: floppytape(HW)
SCSI: scsitape(HW)

For more information on using tape drives, see the System Administration Guide.