Kevin Robertson writes:
> We recently sent a 4mm DAT tape to a vendor in native Pro/E and IGES format.
> They could not read the tape and requested DDS2 format, our tape was DDS1.
> I'm not familiar with either of these and was hoping someone could explain
> the difference.
DDS (Digital Data Storage, as opposed to Ditial Audio Tape - i.e. DAT)
is a data storage format. A DDS tape is a tape that meets the
requirements of this format (data density and tape length in
particular). DDS2 is an "enhanced" form of DDS and DDS3 is still much
better. And I heard a rumour that there are people designing DDS4.
The different DDS tapes are recognized by a so-called Media
Recognition System, which means that the drive recognizes the tape as
you insert it and knows how to deal with it. The DDS formats are
backward compatible, which basically means that a tape drive that is
DDS2-compliant should be able to read DDS1-tapes if it is configured
correctly. So your problem will probably not be solved by just sending them
a DDS2-tape.
There are numerous problems when exchanging DDS-tapes between
different Unixes (or should the plural form be "Unices"???). And I
presume the problems are even greater when trying to survive in
a DOS/Windows environment.
If you are using some flavour of Unix, tell me which platform and
Operating System version you and your partner are using and I'll try
to give you some hints how to solve your problem. If you are using
PC's, all I can say is: "Use The Force, Luke".
//zaphod
PS. Send your reply directly to me, not to the list. There's no need
to waste bandwith with this kind of technical details that are not
RP-related.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:39:27 EEST