> >I assume that a CD-R, at least, would require special support.  But could
> >I just treat a CD-RW as a removable media SCSI disk & put a BSD FFS on it?
> 
> No; they're not *that* kind of rewritable.

Hm.  Okay, I'll take your word for it, but I don't understand.  Where
would I look if I had the time to read/understand the difference?  Or can
you give me a technical explanation off-hand?  (I.e., the question is "Why
do CD-RW drives not support rewriting in the same manner as a hard disk?"
I am vaguely aware that CD-RW sectors start to go bad after a thousand or
so rewrites, so you need to "scatter" the usage pattern around the disk to
get a long life out of the media.  Is that the only problem?  In and of
itself, that would make it seem "unwise" to install a standard filesystem
on a CD-RW, but not unworkable.) 


FWIW: I went ahead and installed a Seagate "Hornet" Travan drive.  It
supports "8GB" of compressed data (i.e., 4GB of raw data) on QIC 3095
tapes.  It costs around $270, mail-order, and supposedly can do about
600KB/sec.  Other than a possible problem when reading the last file from
a tarfile, it seems to work nicely with NetBSD 1.3.  Naturally, more speed
would be nice, but that's not too important.  As far as I could see, the
price seems fairly good for a SCSI tape drive. 


> I know BSD/OS has support, and it's probably pretty trivial to port; it's
> pretty much userland utils that emit SCSI commands.

...but one would have to have BSD/OS to get one's hands on this, yes?  Or
is the CD-RW support seperate & freely-available?


Thanks for the quick answer, in any case.  Have a good holiday season.


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu