Quantum Tape Drive LTO-3 - Manual (Page 71)

Chapter 6 UNIX Settings
Configuring for the Sun Environment (Solaris 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 7, 8, and 9)
LTO-3 Tape Drive User’s Guide 57
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-r
command. 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.