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8. Specific tape drives

8.1 The Seagate TR4 SCSI drive

You must prepare a tape as follows before use with taper:

mt-st -f /dev/st0 setblk 32768
dd if=/dev/zero ibs=32k of=/dev/st0 obs=32k

In taper, set the set block size preference ON and set the blocksize to 32768. You can use other block sizes other than 32K - make sure you change the appropriate values.

Set the preference "use eom" ON.

8.2 Some SCSI drives

Some SCSI drives require the scsi2logical parameter set. There are two ways of doing this.

8.3 Adaptec aicxxx

From Ringo.DeSmet@advalvas.be:

When I started backing up, I had quite some problems, but these were related to the adaptec aic7xxx low-level scsi driver. I am now running kernel 2.0.30 with aic7xxx driver version 2.1.26 (Jun 1). If other people with similar config asks you, I have the following options enabled in the source code of the driver (aic7xxx.c):

7^

#define TAGGED_QUEUEING_BY_DEVICE

and a few lines beneath it, you can set the SCB queue depth for each device. People must check with the scsiconfig utility which devices support Tagged Queueing. There are 16 values that can be filled in: scsi id 0 to 15. The adapter supports it, as well as my first harddisk. All other devices have tagged queueing disabled. The line in the driver for me looks as follows:

{ 4, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, 8, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1}

which means that I tell the scsi driver that my HD (/dev/sda) can accept 4 SCBs and my adapter can accept 8. "-1" means disabled...


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