All drives that are both QIC-117 compatible and one of the QIC-40, 80, 3010, and 3020 standards should work. QIC-WIDE and Travan drives are also supported (TR-1 is just QIC-80 with 8mm tapes, while TR-2 and TR-3 is a.k.a QIC-3010 and 3020 respectively).
Currently, the list of drives that are known to work with
ftape is:
You can always check out the newest list of drives that are recognized
by ftape, by looking in the file vendors.h in the
ftape distribution.
Although I do not want to endorse one drive type over another, I want to it has been reported that the Colorado DJ-20 drive is rather noisy, when compared to, say, a Conner C250MQ drive ('tis said that the Colorado is 5-10 times as noisy as the Conner drive. Since I have neither, I can't tell for sure).
If you have a Tallgrass FS300 and an AHA1542B, you need to increase
the bus-on / bus-off time of the 1542B. Antti Virjo
(<klanvi@uta.fi>), says that changing
CMD_BUSON_TIME to 4 and CMD_BUSOFF_CMD to 12 in
linux/drivers/scsi/aha1542.c will do the trick.
NOTE: If you have a drive that works fine, but it is not listed here,
please send a mail to the HOWTO maintainer
(<kjj@primenet.com>).
These dedicated high-speed tape controllers are supported by
ftape:
Support for the FC-10 controller has been merged into the
ftape driver in version 1.12. See the RELEASE-NOTES
and the Makefile files in the ftape distribution.
Since of version 2.03 of ftape, the FC-20 controller will
work (but do check the Release notes!).
The support for the MACH-2 controller was added in
ftape-1.14d.
To use the Iomega Tape Accelerator II, use -DMACH2, and set
the right settings for I/O base, IRQ and DMA. This works (by the
empirical testing of Scott Bailey
<sbailey@xcc.mc.xerox.com>), with at least
ftape-2.02.
The Iomega Ditto Dash, and all other known 2Mbps controllers, use the Intel 82078-1 chip, which can run at 2Mbps. Support for the 82078-1 is currently under development. It is hoped that the support will be completed during January or February.
Current status is that it will work at 1Mbps, with 2Mbps support coming soon (i hope!).
Generally, ALL drives that connect to the parallel port are NOT supported. This is because these drives uses (different) proprietary interfaces, that are very much different from the QIC-117 standard.
The Irwin AX250L (and the IBM Internal Tape Backup Unit) does not work
the ftape. This is because they only support QIC-117, but
not the QIC-80 standard (they use Irwin's proprietary ``servoe
(Rhomat)'' format). I know nothing about the Rhomat format, nor where
to get any info on it. Sorry.
The COREtape light does not accept the initialisation commands, we're feeding it. This pretty much leaves the drive unusable.
ftapeIf you have a floppy controller which has a female DB37 connector on
the bracket (and some means of delivering power to the drive), you can
use it with ftape. OK, that sentence was not very
obvious. Let's try it this way: Some FDC's (the very ancient one's),
have a DB37 connector on the bracket, for connecting to external
floppy drives.
If you make a suitable cable (from a quick glance on an FDC that I've
got lying around, it seems to be a straight 1-to-1 cable. However,
your mileage may vary) from the DB37 connector (on the FDC) and to your
external tape drive, you can get ftape to control your tape
drive.
This is because that from a program's view there is no difference
between the internal and the external connectors. So, from
ftape's point of view, they are identical.
The power connector is of the "mini" type, sitting on 3.5" floppy drives. The idea appears to be that you plug one of the power connectors from the PSU to this connector on the board. If you want to use just a single cable, you might want to get a 50 wire cable, and use multiple wires for the power lines (and ground, for that matter).
ftapePCI motherboards and ftapeUnfortunately, some PCI motherboards cause problems when running
ftape. Some people have experienced that ftape
would not run in a PCI based box, but ran flawlessly in a normal ISA
based 386DX machine. If you have such a problem, please read the
README.PCI file in the ftape distribution.