The Ftape Installation and Usage Guide - Device description
For each kind of tape device provided by ftape-3.04d (and later versions) there are
four different device nodes in the `/dev/
' subdirectory which's
names only differ in the last letter which is a digit between `0
'
and `3
'.
These four different device names come from the fact that it is in principle possible to connect four different hardware devices to a floppy controller. Often one refers to these hardware devices as drive A to drive D. Indeed, when programming the floppy controller, one has to address the first floppy drive (not floppy tape drive) as drive A, the second as drive B. So this is the root of this naming habit.
For floppy tape drives it normally doesn't matter which drive selection
(`A
', `B
', `C
' or `D
') one uses to program the
floppy controller, although there are some drives that have jumpers to
configure which selection the tape drive expects. So, `0
' maps to
`treating the tape drive as drive A
' and so forth. Normally there
is no difference at all between those tape devices because the floppy
tape drives ignore the floppy drive selection method but are woken up by
sending special commands to the tape drive.
A notable exception is the Iomega Ditto Max
drive, at least when
used with the Iomega Ditto EZ
4Mbit controller. It refuses to
work with other `drive selections
' than drive A
.
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