Re: transfer from explorer to Symbolics

[Reti@SCRC-RIVERSIDE.ARPA]

    Date: Thu, 23 Mar 89 17:13:23 EDT
    From: mike%ists.ists.ca@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Mike Clarkson)

    > To everyone else listening on SLUG, please note that there is no
    > advantage to using QIC-11 or QIC-24 formats, other than for compatiblity
    > purposes.  The different formats have nothing to do with density or tape
    > capacity.
    >      

    I believe that QIC-24 has both higher density and more error checking.
My understanding (from reading two different cart drive manuals recently,
unfortunately they aren't to hand for me to tell you which) is that 
the density of bits written on tape is the same; the contents of the header on
each block (which the user doesn't get to see) is slightly different, with the
QIC-24 header being slightly longer (so in the absolute most ideal case, you
could get a few kilobytes more on QIC-11).

A more important problem is that QIC-11 wasn't as standardized as QIC-24, so that
at least some drives which claimed to support QIC-11 didn't allow interchange.

    Mike.

    --
    Mike Clarkson					mike@ists.UUCP
    Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science	mike@ists.ists.ca
    York University, North York, Ontario,		uunet!mnetor!yunexus!ists!mike
    CANADA M3J 1P3					+1 (416) 736-5611