# SATA Tape Drive?



## alpha-lemming (Jul 15, 2010)

Hello,

Are SATA tape drives supported on FreeBsd? 
I see that they are on other BSD's, but I don't find any mention of them on the FreeBSD compatibility pages.

Thanks.


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## mav@ (Jul 16, 2010)

Theoretically - yes. Practically - it's rather rare beasts, so should be tested.


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## fronclynne (Jul 16, 2010)

If it does it'll be either /dev/ast* or /dev/sa* depending on whether you have "options ATA_CAM" in kernel or not (at least that's my guess).  I've never actually used any form of ATA* tape drive since I threw away an old colorado unit back around 1996 (and good riddance to that pile of garbage, too), but the sa(4) stuff under cam(4) seems to have a much better command set.

I've always had terrible results with tape drives, but I've never used one new enough to be on a SATA bus.  Good luck.


*I'm pretty sure they weren't actually ATA or even IDE, but I'd rather not dig up painful memories in any case.


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