🚀 go-pugleaf

We currently have an Hewlett Packard 35450A Digital Audio Tape (DAT) tape
drive on evaluation, which is connected to a 4/110 with a external disk
box. This drive is somewhat similar to the Exabyte drive except it uses
4mm DAT tapes instead of the 8mm video tapes, and the capacity is lower at
1.3 vs. 2.2 gigabytes.

The documentation specifies that it is possible to search the tape at 200
times normal speed with this drive, which it does not seem to be doing
with the TAR command.  We are using the device driver /dev/rst1 with the
drive, which is the driver for the standard 1/4 inch cartridge tape.  I
believe that the 1/4 driver does not support the command in the DAT drive
hardware that initiates the high speed search (SPACE command).  This
brings me to the question :

What would be involved with either adding this capability to TAR or
developing an alternate driver that could take advantage of the high speed
search capability? I would be open to modifying existing code to achieve
this; would GNU TAR be a good starting point?

It seems to me that this high speed search capability (less than 20
seconds to find a file on a 1.3 gigabyte tape) appears to be a major
advantage over Exabyte based drives. I have also heard that the DAT drives
are more reliable; any comments?

Thanks,

Tom Karches
Texas Instruments, Dallas
214/480-4468