Quantum manual LTO-3 Tape Drive User’s Guide

Chapter 6 UNIX Settings Configuring for the Sun Environment (Solaris 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 7, 8, and 9)

The value 0x1d639 equates to the way that the LTO-3 Tape Drive is configured to operate in the Solaris environment. This value enables the LTO-3 Tape Drive to:

Support variable length records (variable length block size)

•Backspace over files (same as .mt bsf. command to backspace over filemarks)

•Backspace over records (same as .mt bsr., backspace over individual tape blocks)

•Long time-out for long erase function (it is not recommended to try and erase the entire tape)

•The LTO-3 Tape Drive knows when end of data has been encoun- tered

•Device driver is unloadable

•Long timeouts (5 times longer than normal)

•Buffered writes supported

•Variable record size not limited to 64k

•Uses Mode Select Page 10h to enable/disable compression

Once st.conf has been modified, the kernel must be reconfigured by booting the system using the boot-rcommand. If you are replacing a tape device with the same SCSI ID you may want to delete the st devices from the /dev/rmt directory (recommended).

When using commands that require a blocking factor such as tar or ufsdump, we suggest a minimum factor of 64. The preferred factor is 128.

For commands that use density and tape size settings the tape density is 124,000 bpi and the tape length is 1800 feet. We suggest using the ufsdump/ufsrestore commands. These commands automatically detect end of tape without the need of the density and tape length settings.

To enable the st driver to turn on data compression when writing data to tape use the .c. option. For example, tar cf /dev/rmt/0c causes the tape drive to compress the data before writing the data to tape.

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