Ultrium 448 Tape Drive

[Chuck Swiger]

On Feb 21, 2007, at 10:47 AM, jhall at vandaliamo.net wrote:
> From what I have read, I think the Ultrium tape drive is completely
> compatible with FreeBSD.  If I am understanding the specs  
> correctly, it
> uses hardware compression to compress data.  And, again if I am
> understanding everything correctly, I should be able to use the mt  
> command
> to tell the tape drive to use hardware compression.

Pretty much all SCSI-based tape drives work just fine with the normal  
st device; and yes, one can use "mt comp" command to enable or  
disable the built-in hardware compression.  However, most tape drives  
default to enabling their preferred compression algorithm already, so  
you most likely won't need to do anything special except run tar,  
dump, or whatever to actually write data to the tape...

Ultrium/LTO is a pretty good form-factor-- certainly better than the  
helical-scan 4mm DDS systems, but I have a mild preference for (s)DLT.

-- 
-Chuck