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 recognised 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 mention 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. I can't tell for sure, but I have a Colorado, and it is quite noisy).
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 (<khp@pip.dknet.dk>).
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 milage 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. As far as I can see on the board, the idea is 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, I'd suggest that you 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.