Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome at real-time.com> wrote:
>
> tape drives are particularly bad, in my experience; I think it's because I/O
> is so slow on them. so *don't* kill a process (tar, dump, etc) that's
> acessing a tape device, unless you're willing to deal with it hanging and
> forcing a reboot to make it work again.

Heh..  Tape drives seem to carry a lineage that makes them some of the
most autonomous devices that get connected to computers.  I'm pretty sure
that when you tell a tape drive to erase a tape, just one (or perhaps a
few) SCSI commands get sent to the drive.  The drive erases the tape, but
doesn't respond to anything until the tape is done erasing (or until it
finds a bad segment of tape and spits out an I/O error).

It's like the polar opposite of the software modems we see these days..

-- 
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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