Installing and Configuring an ATAPI Tape Drive
ATAPI tape drives are physically installed and configured just like any other ATAPI/IDE device: set the drive’s Master/Slave jumper; secure the drive in an available drive bay using four screws; connect the data cable, aligning Pin 1 on the drive connector with the colored stripe on the cable; and connect the power cable. Note the following issues when installing an ATAPI tape drive:
Installing a tape drive on the same IDE channel as a hard disk risks data corruption. If the system has one hard disk, install it as the Primary Master and the tape drive on the Secondary channel. If the system has two hard disks, install both on the Primary channel, and install the tape drive on the Secondary channel. Do not install three ATA hard disks in a system with an ATAPI tape drive. If the system has an ATAPI CD-ROM drive, make that drive Secondary Master and the tape drive Secondary Slave. If the system has no ATAPI CD-ROM drive, make the tape drive Secondary Master.
Some tape drives have configuration jumpers to enable such things as hardware compression, read-while-write, DMA/PIO mode, and emulation mode. If your drive has one or more of these jumpers, set them as follows:
- Hardware compression
Ordinarily, enable this option to allow the drive itself to compress the data stream before recording it to tape, but note that software compression is sometimes more efficient than hardware compression. If you enable hardware compression, disable compression ...
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