On 28/10/14 14:59, Dmitri Maziuk wrote:

> OT comment: I'll probably never understand that, I always thought a
> block device is a block device and one of the unix's strong points was
> to abstract away the physical differences and let the same code work
> with either.

Block devices may be block devices, but a tape drive is a character device.

> AFAICT the only reason they're different (in how SD treats
> them) is because the software is written that way...

It's more about the way people approach the configuration and that has 
much more to do with sequential vs random access and device naming 
conventions.

People coming from a disk-environment tend to see files on disks 
(volumes) as dedicated to a client, because you can trivially skip from 
volume to volume and access multiple volumes simultaneously.


People coming from a tape environment tend to see tapes (volumes) as 
something you use for a pool of clients or filesets, because changing 
volumes is NOT trivial, the tapes are only reated for a limited number 
of load cycles and you can only access one volume at a time.

If you have more tape drives you can access more volumes simultaneously, 
but changing volumes is no less difficult/timeconsuming.





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