Well, either the other drive is buggy, or our code fails with some drive that does meet specs. I would suggest figuring out what kind of scsi debugging you can turn on and looking at the commands going back and forth.
Or the user make assumption because something isn't explained in man mt || mt stI thourged eew is always enabled by default. Because I see no disadvantage of not enabling this mode. But obviously it isn't. Even more mt status doesn't return information about this setting.
So I wasn't aware of. Maybe it should be noticed somewhere? Best Regards Stephan