CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

CA>> My only hands-on experience with tape drives has been the Colorado 
CA>> Jumbo (inexpensive) drive and I wasn't happy using it. Besides 
CA>> being slow, it had an irritating whine to it and seemed to love to 
CA>> retension the tape and do lots of rewinding and fast forwarding 
CA>> even when there was no need to 'seek' for anything.  :-\

RJT> I found this drive to be rather irritating as well, and was also 
RJT> rather surprised that since I had seen it mentioned in here (or on 
RJT> fido at least) a fair amount at the time that nobody had seemed to 
RJT> mention this noise, and warn me about what I was getting into... 
RJT> :-)

CA> I complained about the noise of the Colorado Jumbo and was told to
CA> stop whining?

I didn't see that back when.  And anyway,  it's not us that's whining, 
it's the damn tape drive...!

CA>> Possibly with a better (more expensive?) tape drive my experiences 
CA>> would've been more enlightening.

RJT> The other drive I was trying out here used larger tapes (DC600 and 
RJT> similar sizes) and while it also had an irritating noise, it was 
RJT> nowhere near as bad.

CA> I've heard larger tape drives and they don't whine as loudly or as
CA> high-pitched as the Jumbo did/does.

CA>> As it is now, I would avoid tape like the plague.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that,  but I have four drives here,  and a
whole mess of tapes,  and am not doing anything with any of them.  Maybe if
I set up a "backup server" and put it somewhere that it wouldn't
bother anybody...?  :-)

CA> --8<--cut 

CA>> I'm not so sure what the "no filesystem" is meant to
describe but 
CA>> I do know that unformatted media whether it be tape, floppies, or 
CA>> a hard drive will not accept a write operation under any OS I can 
CA>> think of.

RJT> Oh, but it will. That was exactly my point in bringing this up in 
RJT> the first place. What playing around with tapes I did do under 
RJT> linux involved _no_ "formatting" of any sort. You wanted blocks of 
RJT> data written to the tape, they'd get written. What he seems to be 
RJT> suggesting here (I haven't tried it) is that you can do the same 
RJT> thing with floppies and other devices. 

CA> OK, so I do this onto a tape that already has data on it, then 
CA> what?

Well,  unless you made it a point to seek to the end of what was already
there,  it gets overwritten.

CA>> Burning files to a CD is a possible exception as the 'format' and 
CA>> the file are moved simultaneously to the media in one operation 
CA>> unless it's a CDRW CD and in that case it must be formatted prior 
CA>> to any write operations.

CA>> MSDOS (and others) can also redirect output to a file using stdout 
CA>> and read the file back using stdin once the media has been 
CA>> formatted.

RJT> Yeah, but we're not talking about formatting here anyway, we're 
RJT> talking about the next higher level of abstraction that's imposed 
RJT> by the use of a filesystem. You don't need one of those with a cd, 
RJT> either. That ISO image can containn darn near anything you want.

CA> Yes, the ISO is a copy at the binary level. I understand that. I 
CA> can't imagine how I could store multiple saves onto a tape without 
CA> erasing what is already there and not courrupting the entire thing 
CA> into a jumbled mess though.

It all depends on what software is driving it.  If you start out by seeking
to the end of what's written (I've already forgotten how you'd do that
since it's been 3-4 years since I was playing with that),  then there isn't
any problem.

There was one other operation I would've probably found to be handy,  too
-- something that would seek to the end of the tape and figure out how many
blocks of data you could write.  Since I've got a bunch of different sizes
of tapes,  that one might be useful too...

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