CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to VIKTOR PILPENOK:

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

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

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

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

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

VP> So it really was a hammer when a hammer is needed the problem is 
VP> that nowadays some people try to use it as a screwdriver :) 

CA> OK, I can accept that analogy as well. :-) 

VP> Also, someone mentioned tar being able to work wihout a filesystem, 
VP> actually almost any program under linux that stores it's stuff into 
VP> one file can wotk directly with devices (w/o a FS) try ZIPing 
VP> something to /dev/fd and it will work fine. 

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

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

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.

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

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