Googling around finds lots of comments about the drive needing a long
timeout for some operations, but no mention of the "short write" issue.

Just to be sure, I copied some real data to the tape, and it does NOT
return "every other byte" (ie, all odd-numbered or all even-numbered).
It actually truncates the reecord exactly in the middle.

Also just for completeness, I booted up an older NetBSD 3.something
i386 kernel, and got the same results.  So it's not amd64-specific.

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> Hardware compression?
>
> No, but seriously... sounds like it may be hardware in search of a
> Quirk.
>
> Have you checked around via Google for whether there's some fancy
> goobledygook the vendor wants you to put into, for example,
> Solaris's /kernel/drv/st.conf? (Unless I've missed more than I
> thought ignoring things since roughly 1.6, we haven't got a similar
> driver config file, but, you know, rebuild your kernel.)

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