Can I use dds4 tape on dds3 tape disk?

[Steve_393]

Can I use dds4 tape on dds3 tape disk?

thanks

[Mark Grant]

Sadly not.

[G. Vrijhoeven]

HI,

No, it is only backward compatible. So DDS4 drive can read DDSn tapes.

HTH,

Gideon

[Stefan Farrelly]

You can, with a bit of work. You need to create a special driver on your server with the DDS4 drive using the mksf command. Then write to the tape using the new device file you created, then you can use the tape in a DDS3 drive.

eg.

mksf -H -b DDS3 /dev/rmt/

Where is the path of your DDS4 drive and is something like /dev/rmt/temp

Then write to your tape using /dev/rmt/temp instead of the normal /dev/rmt/0m

Make sure you use a 125m tape (or 120m).

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Stefan,
Have you tried ?
I am not sure if it will work. The DDS4 and DDS3 medias is physically different and I don't belive the DDS3 drive will accept a DDS4 media.

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

Leif is correct, the drive will not accept the tape and will simply eject it.

regards,
Thierry.

[Stefan Farrelly]

If you use a DDS2 (120m) or DDS3 (125m) tape in your DDS4 drive you can write to it aok.
We use 125m (DDS3) tapes in our DDS4 drives and they work perfectly.

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi Stefan

what you write, seems a bit confusing.
Let me try to clarify it.
You create a new device file on a machine with a dds-4 drive for a dds-3 drive.

This you must of course copy to the machine with the dds-3 drive and this will allow you to use dds-4 tapes in a dds-3 drive.

Have I got you right?

Michael

[Stefan Farrelly]

Hi Michael,

nope. To clarify;

1. You cannot physically use a DDS4 tape (150m) in a non DDS4 drive - it simply gets spat out (regardless of how you wrote to it).

2. If you need to use a tape in a DDS4 drive on a DDS3 or DDS2 drive then my earlier reply is how to do it - use a DSS2 (120m) or DDS3 (125m) tape in your DDS4 drive, create a special device file to write to it, then you can remove it and put in a DDS3 drive and read it fine.

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi Stefan,

I am still confused. Why the device file?
Why not insert dds-3 tape into dds-4 drive, write, insert dds-3 tape into dds-3 drive and read?
What problems could there be?
Can the dds-4 write someting on a dds-3 tape, a dds-3 drive can't read?

Michael

ps. so the initial answer was of course no!