Whoooohooo!

I now have a working HP 7979A 9 track tape drive with apparently supported
density of 1600bpi... very nice..

Anyway, this raised a few questions: (HP9000/380 + expander)
When I tried it previously I had a DIO-I scsi card + disks, built in hp-ib
+disks and the 7979A was on the fast hp-ib (daughterboard connected to the
cpu-board).. didn't work. After that I tried some disks in the fast hp-ib
and they worked.

Yesterday I had a great big flash of intuition and ripped the fast hp-ib
from the
system and replaced it with scsi connector going straight to the cpu-board.
Okay, now I had a cd in the DIO-I scsi, some disks in the 32-bit scsi and
three disks, a 9144 ct0 and the 7979A in the *slow* built-in internal´hp-ib.
It worked,
though a bit slowly. When I was doing a dd from the scsi-drives
#dd if=/tmp/2_meg_file of=/dev/nrmt8 bs=10240
I got transfer speeds of about 179K/s with some soft errors and the tape
drive was going back and forth like crazy..

Any ideas why it didn't work with the fast hp-ib ? are there some "you've
got fast hp-ib, therefore you can't use scsi" rules ? It would be nice to
know before I go out and buy a couple of DIO-I scsi and hp-ib cards :-)

--
Jarkko Teppo    jarkko.teppo@nfp.fi