Nathan,

Have you ever heard of DECtape? I was one inch wide tape on a small
diameter reel. The ones I saw were used on a PDP-11. Their claim to fame
is that the are block addressable, i.e. they looked like a disk drive to
the operating system. This means you could use erase a file in the middle
of the tape. Such an operation is not possible with regular tape drives;
they are sequential devices. Later, Digital came out with DECtape II; it
was a quarter inch tape in a format similar to a QIC tape.

The Viper 150 sounds like a QIC 150M drive. It almost certainly sequential
and will not support what you want to do.

However, all is not lost. You could use the tape to do the equivalent of
a floppy boot. If you have enough memory on your system, you could have
a usable RAM disk (look at 'man mount_mfs' for more info).

On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Nathan Gelbard wrote:
> I've got a Sun Viper 150 tape drive. I've been
> going through my old archives and remembering
> how slow they are. I can get a bunch
> more of these drives at a local surplus store.
> 
> Can tape drives be mounted read/write?
> 
> I'd like to construct a 5 tape drive scsi chain,
> load netbsd-root onto the 1st, /usr on the 2nd,
> /home on the 3rd, swap on the 4th, and leave the
> 5th free for other fun.
> 
> something of a monument to slowness. is it possible?
> 
> natez
> 
> Nate Gelbard		      	       cell: 503.805.1015
> Straylight Research		       fax : 516.828.8533
> 
> 

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