========================================================================= (C) 1994 by Atari Corporation, GEnie, and the Atari Roundtables. May be reprinted only with this notice intact. The Atari Roundtables on GEnie are *official* information services of Atari Corporation. To sign up for GEnie service, call (with modem) 800-638-8369. Upon connection type HHH (RETURN after that). Wait for the U#= prompt.Type XTX99437,GENIE and press [RETURN]. The system will prompt you for your information. ========================================================================== ************ Topic 1 Mon Sep 14, 1992 V.HUTZ [Vern] at 21:55 EDT Sub: TAPE DRIVE BACK-UP What tape drives are out there which support the Atari platform? 35 message(s) total. ************ ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 1 Mon Sep 14, 1992 V.HUTZ [Vern] at 22:03 EDT I own both a 486-50 and the better machine "a TT030". In persuing the need to backup the PC I thought why not get a tape drive to do double duty. I have been met with more than the usual 'Atari has mor than game machines out?'. These are serious periferal drive companies, why don't they support this platform, are drivers that hard to write? What companies have tape drives out which can be used on both IBM and ATARI? Thanks Vern ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 2 Tue Sep 15, 1992 J.MEEHAN3 [>> Joe M << ] at 05:47 EDT Vern, They just don't know. I'll bet some of that tapedrive hardware you have been looking at does support the Atari and they just don't know it does, because they think it is a game machine. >> Joe Meehan << ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 3 Tue Sep 15, 1992 POTECHIN [ Nathan] at 11:10 EDT Personally I am using one of ICD's Hard Drives with Tape Backup. It's fast, clean and works perfectly and guess what, ICD fully supports the Atari line. :- ) I believe they also sell a separate tape backup unit. Nathan @ DMC Publishing ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 4 Tue Sep 15, 1992 AD-VANTAGE at 22:27 EDT Vern, Beckemeyer's Hard Disk Toolkit now supports a wide range of SCSI tape drives. A SCSI controller in your PC would allow you to share drives. Using the ICD Link, the same can be said for other SCSI peripherals between the ST and PC such as a Syquest removable media drive or the PLI Floptical. -- Ron ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 5 Tue Sep 15, 1992 V.HUTZ [Vern] at 23:59 EDT I plan on picking up the "Link" at WAACE, but my PC dealer keeps steering me away from SCSI on that platform because of the additional expense of the perriferals. I'm not 'hardware smart' enough to argue with him to do it my way inspite of his beliefs! Guess I will buy the $200 tape backup for the PC and spend the bucks for removable HD for the TT. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 6 Wed Sep 16, 1992 J.MEEHAN3 [>> Joe M << ] at 05:41 EDT Vern, Check with another dealer who understands SCSI. SCSI has a number of advantages, even on a DOS machine. It may or may not be worth it for your applications, but I doubt if the dealer you are taking to really understands. >> Joe Meehan << ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 7 Wed Sep 16, 1992 POTECHIN [ Nathan] at 19:13 EDT SCSI is FAST and definitely one of the industry standards. I suspect your Dealer might need to do some catching up Vern. I agree with Joe's statement entirely. Nathan @ DMC Publishing ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 8 Wed Sep 16, 1992 AD-VANTAGE at 21:39 EDT Vern, I'll join the choir with Vern and Nathan regarding SCSI on the PC. The PC world was a little late in discovering the advantages of SCSI. I feel SCSI would be in your best interest for the long term. BTW -- $200 PC tape backups are _very_ slow. -- Ron ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 9 Thu Sep 17, 1992 V.HUTZ [Vern] at 00:50 EDT Thank you all, I respect your opinions very much, and will probably stand up for my rights to 'Freedom of purchase' and persue this at another dealership or possibly with those in the KNOW at WAACE. I don't wish to throw money away but I have never minded spending it on a worthwhile product. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 10 Thu Sep 17, 1992 POTECHIN [ Nathan] at 09:19 EDT WAACE sounds like a plan. :-) I'll bet there will be more than one exhibitor there prepared to speak knowledgeably on SCSI Tape Backups and happily take your money from you on the spot. :-) Nathan @ DMC Publishing ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 11 Sat Sep 19, 1992 E.KRIMEN [Ed Krimen] at 22:44 EDT Those of you who know the advantages of SCSI, could you please briefly list a few of them for those here (like me :^) that may not know what they are? In fact, I don't know any of the advantages or disadvantages of the other interfaces. Let's see, there's SCSI, IDE, ESDI, and ST-506, right? ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 12 Sat Sep 19, 1992 V.HUTZ [Vern] at 23:04 EDT I'm curious too, Ed. Why does my PC dealer keep pushing IDE and my all-time- favorite Atari dealer push SCSI. (and then look at me purplexed and say, "but there are 3 types of SCSI, now?"! I,too was confused enough with two choices....and then you went and mentioned ESDI and ST-506??? Whooaa! hold on there boys, I got yer......well anyway this is all an anigment of my referberation, please relucidate!! ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 13 Sun Sep 20, 1992 AD-VANTAGE at 02:03 EDT Ed, Vern, ST-506, IDE and I think ESDI are very much the same. Data transfer is serial. IDE and ESDI allow faster serial transfers and add some on drive intelligence (cache, ???). The hardware is simpler and hence cheaper. I don't think you can have more than two IDE drives in a system. I'm not aware of any non-hard drive IDE products. SCSI I/II uses 8/16 bit parallel transfer. SCSI generaly has a great deal more intelligence and fault tollerance built in to the device. SCSI is general purpose in the sense that many different types of devices are shared across most computing platforms. SCSI allows 8 devices to be daisy chained off one port. Cabling is simpler and designed to be run outside the box. SCSI starts to become more cost effective once you have two or three devices attached to your computer. Comparison is sort of like comparing an IBM dedicated serial printer to an industry standard parallel printer. I'm sure there are more differences but it is late ;-) -- Ron ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 14 Sun Sep 20, 1992 R.WATSON15 [Wayne Watson] at 05:50 EDT ST-506 was one of the original types of drives. These are geenrally MFM and RLL drives that require a seperate controller for the drives. Ancient technology here. IDE is much like ST-506 in that it uses a seperate controller but, the controller and drives are more up to date technology and are faster. ESDI - I haven't a clue. SCSI has the controller built onto the drive. Each drive has it's own controller built in. This is why SCSI drives cost a little more than IDE drives. SCSI drives are really fast and is a standard. IBM types had a lot of trouble handling SCSI because of the transfer speed. IBM types couldn't handle it. Today's clones can handle it better. I get >1 meg transfer rate out of one of my SCSI drives. Also, SCSI drives store all the info about the drive and bad sectors in it's hardware. All the formatting software has to do is read what it is from the drive and format it accordingly. As AD-VANTAGE said, one is serial and the other is parallel. I think I got that right. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 15 Sun Sep 20, 1992 G.ZEPKA1 [Greg] at 21:40 EDT EDSI, It is a intellagent drive like SCSI, but avoid they are not as standard as one would like. For an ST SCSI is the way to go. Greg ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 16 Wed Sep 23, 1992 V.HUTZ [Vern] at 01:06 EDT I just spent 58 minutes formating a 120meg tape. (IDE) How long would I have spent if I had a SCSI stape drive....guestimate is good enough? Should I be useing other party software for my back-up process? Maybe the Colorado software is not optimal in this instance? ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 17 Sun Sep 27, 1992 C.HERBORTH [-Chris-] at 14:48 EDT 58 minutes?!? Yikes. The 60M QIC tapes we use at work take less than five minutes to format... I think this is on a '386 using SCSI for the tape/hard drive... -Chris- ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 18 Sun Oct 04, 1992 M.BAFFONI [Juxtaposer] at 03:44 EDT Hi all, Just wanted to jump into the discussion on drives. :) ST-506 were the first industry standard drives (10MB yuck!) that could handle about 500k/s throughput at 1:1 interleave, and handle at most 2 devices (most often conforming to strict bios parameters). These were the MFM drives. These specifically fell into maximums of 16 heads, 1024 cylinders, 17 sectors/track (512 byte sectors). These communicated BTW with two separate cables - an 8bit data cable (15 pin?) and a 30(32?) pin address/positioning cable. ST-512 drives were the RLL drives (run length limited) which refers to the way the data is encoded, which enabled up to 36/sectors per track (and thus throughputs up to about 900k/s at 1:1), but were otherwise almost identical to MFM drives. IDE is Intelligent Device (something - escapes me now). This refers to the way it can "emulate" a device with different heads/cylinders/sectors- per-track so that if you were stuck with an old bios that could not describe the IDE drive exactly, you could pick one that was close (but of equal or lesser capacity) and it would automatically interpret to the right sectors on the drive. They are limited to an 8bit data cable, but could handle much higher transfer rates (4MB/s sounds like the magic number - it was supposed to compete with and supplant SCSI (then I) as it was "just as fast, more compatible, and cheaper to boot"). They are still limited to only 2 devices. ESDI (don't know what it stands for) was supposed to become the industry standard for high-end machines - small unix stations, servers, etc. This transfer up to around 12MB/s (I know it was faster than 10), but I am not sure about whether it was 8 or 16 bit data path or not. However, it retained the limit of only 2 devices so it was looked over for large multivolume servers, or for those needing to hookup other high-speed devices. SCSI(I) - (Small Computer System Interface) Originated back around '85, had two popular forms - 50pin interleaved flat ribbon cable (ie, between each line was a grounded wire to cut down noise) and the ever popular 25 pin connector. Could address up to 8 (actually seven as the host was always designated "7") devices, 8bit data path, 4MB/s throughput. Each device could be individually configured for (exact drive configuration irrelevant, especially good since some drive manufacturers squeeze more room on discs by varying sectors/track as the head moves away from the center - say 32 on inside tracks and 60 on outer tracks). Due to the generic nature of the SCSI protocol, it was easy to build non-storage devices that use the SCSI bus for high-speed data transfer (scanners, ethernet, etc.). SCSI(II) - Later enhanced version of SCSI(I) that was fully backward compatible, but with proper SCSI(II) devices could achieve 8MB/s avg. throughput, 10MB/s peak throughput, support for a "wide" SCSI implimentation (definately 16-bit data path - maybe 32?) which would increase throughput at least 2x 8-bit rates. Still 8(7) device limitation. I would throw in a description of ACSI (Atari computer system interface), but I don't know much about it except that it is built around a DMA architecture. Corrections, comments, additions welcome. I don't claim to know everything (just almost everything :) . -Mike ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 19 Sun Oct 04, 1992 M.ALLEN14 [Mike Allen] at 06:38 EDT Juxtaposer, Actually, the st-506 was 5 megs. 153 cylinders, 4 heads. I still have one that is working fine after all these years. Mike Allen ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 20 Sun Oct 04, 1992 J.SNYDER7 [Josh Snyder] at 21:58 EDT ST-506 is a Drive... a 5 meg drive from Segate! When released (back in the stoneage) it cost some REAL bucks! the Origanal ST-506 full hight 5 meg drive was quickly out dated with a wopping 10 meg version of the Same thing! I actually have 2-3 (Working!) 5 meg ST-506 drives on the shelf! No $#(%! and as far as I know, only the Mac platform steals SCSI 7 for itselfe! I have has drives ID'ed to all 8 "Channels" on My Atari! And SCSI came from SASI witch is "ALMOST" the same as SCSI, but not really. Josh @ Cali-Co. |--------------------------------------------------------------| | For thows who are watting, Mah-Jong 3.0 will be OFFICIALY | | Out October 30, 1992! Upgrades are $10.00 with ORIGANAL | | Disk! | |--------------------------------------------------------------| ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 21 Mon Oct 05, 1992 A.FASOLDT [Al Fasoldt] at 05:49 EDT Mike, Enhanced Small Disk Interface. Al ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 22 Sun Oct 18, 1992 LEOTAYLOR [LEO] at 17:00 EDT >56 minutes A PC freind has the JUMBO Colorado drive on a "fast" 486, takes 2 hours to format. >Mike BAFFONI A few small corrections, Yes as a few have said, ST506 was the model of the first popular Seagate 5 inch drive. I have two similar 5 MEG drives on my SWTP 6800 computer (still works!). The smaller cable was 20 pins and was for differential serial data. Additional pins were grounds, and spares later used for such things as old SyQuest disk change. RLL stored 1.5 times the data of MFM, usually 25 sectors per track rather than the 36 you mentioned. IDE is Integrated Data Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics depending on who you ask. It's main claim to fame is most of the controller was integrated on the drive, eliminating the expensive PC bus card. Many IDEs plug right into a connector on the motherboard freeing up an I/O slot. They are fast and do remap the heads and tracks. Problems with them are they are almost unheard of outside the PC world, can't be formatted if you blow away the sector headers, and limited to two drives. I suppose if they are so cheap you won't plan to use them long... SCSI and SCSI-2 are popular in the Workstation market as well as ATARI and now a few PCs. There is at least another connector, the "HIGH DENSITY" 50 pin. Along with Differential SCSI there is plenty of opportunity to get two devices that won't talk to each other. Leo Taylor ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 23 Thu Dec 03, 1992 D.BECKEMEYER [David @ BDT] at 21:31 EST I uploaded a file about tape drives and the Atari ST. See my message in Cat 2, Topic 34 about SCSITAPE.DOC in the library. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 24 Fri Jan 22, 1993 J.HICKEY6 at 10:06 EST Does anyone out there know if a 9 track, 6250 bpi drive has been used with the ST or TT computers? I am currently using DbMan on a TT for a large(110 MB) County voter registration data base, which I originally rented($50) from the county on mainframe tape(6250 BPI). Also, the County Assessor offers similar tapes for rent and the U.S. Postal Service provides 9-digit ZIP info in the same format. BYTE magazine has ads for such tape drives for use on you know what platform. Vendors are Overland Data, Qualstar and Laguna Data Systems. Jack Hickey ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 25 Sat Jan 23, 1993 T.DODGE at 02:50 EST two more cents. RLL drive encoding is at 26 sectors per track. IDE drives are 16 bit, although there are a few 8 bit like the Segate 351-X. SCSI II standard allows for 56 devices. As for the data transfer rate I am not sure that it is defined in the standard but to the limitations of the electronics. I know that a 16 bit Ultrastor SCSI controller can do a burst cycle at 33Mb/sec and a sustained 20Mb/sec, while many other controllers hover around thhe 5-10Mb/sec range. Drives are plentiful at the 10Mb/sec range and are going up. The SCSI III interface allows for something neat, more than one computer attached to one drive and a cable length in meters(I forgot how many, but it is a considerable distance if you remember the 18" atari drive cable.) There are a number of IDE low level formatting utilities currently available. And while IDE drives usually only allow for a MASTER/SLAVE (computer people are REALLY lonely) configuration, the makers of the Summit 305 IDE tape drive attaches as the 3rd device, and it is a very fast pc tape backup for around $300. As for what drive to go with??? Stick to SCSI, by far the better choice for the power user. The drive can always be used on another machine if you ever decide that you need to move on/up, while IDE is limited outside of the pc areana. that's all Tom Dodge MegaComputers ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 26 Sat Jan 23, 1993 DOUG.W [ICD RT] at 14:57 EST Tom, SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 allow up to 8 devices on the SCSI bus at one time. This can be any combination of devices, including multiple computers, hard drives, optical drives, scanners, etc. SCSI-2 specifies a maximum cable length (for Single-Ended SCSI) of 6 meters. BTW, complete copies of the SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 specifications are available for downloading from the ICD RoundTable. --Doug @ ICD ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 27 Thu Jan 28, 1993 D.BECKEMEYER [David @ BDT] at 02:53 EST Jack, you could connect a 9-track 1/2" reel-to-reel tape drive to your Atari ST/TT using an ICD Link or other ST host adapter and the Beckemeyer SCSI Tape Kit software drivers. I know it works because I have done it. However, 9- track 1/2" tapes are not the easiest to work with and are expensive. There are data conversion services that can convert the tape to a more handy format, like 250MB QIC (quarter-inch-tape), or even 8mm. An 8mm 2.3GB drive won't cost any more than a 1/2" 9-track drive and the media is a lot cheaper and smaller. Check the back of Byte again for data conversion services. Contact me in e-mail or at 510-530-9637 for more info on the SCSI Tape Kit. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 28 Sun Feb 21, 1993 R.GREIN [Randy Grein] at 11:53 EST >56 minutes Hi! I've installed quite a few Jumbo Colorado drives (I'm a system engineer for a network consulting company) and they do take about an hour to format. Interestingly, the format speed should be largely independent of machine speed; they operate off of the floppy controller or a custom board of their own. Formats take so long because they lay tracks down lengthwise on the tape; up to 28 of them! This means 28 traversals of the tape, laying down reference information on each one. A much faster (and more reliable) format is the DAT tape drives out, of which I've also installed quite a few. They format on the fly, last much longer and hold anywhere from 1.2 gig to a monster recently advertised at 25 gigabytes! They are also unfortunately much more expensive, and real overkill unless you've got around 500 meg to back up. They also are much faster; real backup speeds are anywhere from 8 meg to 15 meg/minute. Maximum I've heard of is that monster drive at 90 meg/minute. >SCSI, ESDI IDE & other Drives Actually, MFM and RLL refer to the encoding methods used on the physical media; ESDI, SCSI and IDE refer to the communication methods used with the drives, as does the ST-506 standard. RLL encoding requires higher density media as well as more accurate positioning hardware for the read/write heads. The IBM AT was designed with st-506 drives in mind, the bios actually has "standard" mfm drive parameters hardcoded in. The bios actually controls the drive, leading to real problems with using drive types. The SCSI standard was developed for minicomputers, which is why it allows so many devices to be chained together. ALL SCSI chains allow a maximum of 8 devices including the host, leaving a maximum of 7 attached drives to a single chain. More may be attached by utilizing a second channel; up to 4 for a pc under Novell or Unix, and I believe 3 for an ST using the ASCI port. SCSI II is a considerable enhancement of SCSI I, not only quite a bit faster but has additional features such as a disconnect command so that the host can make a data request of another drive in the chain while the first one fetches data. The IDE spec was developed specifically for the PC, the controller actually is part of the drive. Being so PC specific it's unlikely that it would ever be used anywhere else. It can be quite fast and is inexpensive in part because the controller is built into the drive, in part because of the sheer number of PC's being built today. ESDI was developed to replace the ST-506 standard. Featuring much higher transfer rates (up to 25 megabytes/s), the ability to use a cache, and support for more than 1024 cylinders, it had become prominent in high end PC's until the recent advent of large, fast IDE drives and the emergence of SCSI-2. As a result, it is being discontinued. PC's will support at least 4 hard drive controllers but DOS will only use 2. ST-506, ESDI controllers and IDE adapters will all only support 2 drives each. All use parallel, not serial data transfers, but ST-506, IDE, some SCSI and (I believe) ESDI all do asynchronous data transfers. Some SCSI controllers and drives do use synchronous transfer methods, which are much faster. There's quite a bit more; I can get more details/corrections if anyone's interested. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 29 Mon Feb 22, 1993 A.FASOLDT [Al Fasoldt] at 06:53 EST Thanks, Randy; that was interesting, and you obviously know what you are talking about. One additional note: Although IDE is a PC-specific system, Atari's Falcon and ICD's ST/TT/Falcon HD software all handle IDE devices. Al ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 30 Thu Mar 04, 1993 V.HUTZ at 01:11 EST Thank you, Randy! My solution for the time delay is to use my TT for downloading and GEnie maintaince when the PC is backing up to tape, and the PC PC for graphics when the TT is backing up. :) Wish I could afford a DAT but the things ahead of it on my wish list come to about one whole years' salary!!! Thanksagainseeya Vern ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 31 Sun Jun 27, 1993 D.PHILLIPS24 [Darcy] at 20:39 EDT Does anyone here know of a way to use a consumer DAT machine (one designed to record audio, that is) as a data back up with a computer? For instance, a cable that is SCSI on one end and RCA on the other, to plug into the AES/EBU input on the DAT?(or is it S/PDIF- well whichever the consumer digital transfer format is, I can never remember). Darcy ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 32 Mon Jun 28, 1993 A.FASOLDT [Al Fasoldt] at 17:42 EDT Darcy, No. DAT machines used for computer data backup are driven differently. Al ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 33 Thu Aug 12, 1993 J.BATTEY1 [J. L. Battey] at 21:55 EDT Has anyone put together a driver for the Exabyte 8mm SCSI helical scan tape drives? I can get the mech fairly cheaply (especially if the Super Collider dies) and the $/MByte cost on media is untouchable. John L. ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 34 Tue Aug 17, 1993 D.BECKEMEYER [David @ BDT] at 22:20 EDT The Beckemeyer Development Hard Disk Toolkit Plus SCSI Tape Kit includes an ACSI (DMA port) driver which has been tested with 8mm Exabyte drives. The tape kit retails for $49.95 US and includes the tape backup/restore application and TSR AUTO folder drivers for the tape device. The tape drive is connected to the host adapter's SCSI output (ICD Link, Supra, BMS, or Atari host adapters supported). -- David Beckemeyer (david@bdt.com) | P.O. Box 21575, Oakland, CA 94620 Beckemeyer Development | UUCP: uunet!ossi!bdt!david ---> Via BDT GenieGATE Tue, 17 Aug 1993 17:54:31 GMT ------------ Category 4, Topic 1 Message 35 Wed Aug 18, 1993 A.FASOLDT [Al Fasoldt] at 03:26 EDT David, This would plug into my TT's SCSI port, then? Al ------------