Rivergate Software Inc. - makers of DVDAfterEdit

The screen shot above shows two tape drives, one real and one emulated. By default DDPAB shows four tape drives, actual drives first, and emulated tape drives if necessary to fill the tape selection area up to four drives. Here we have moved the split divider so that only the first two drives are shown.

The first, actual, drive is a Compaq DLT8000 which we bought new for $189.99 from eBay. The firmware is at revision level 0259. The Quantum DLT Sage Utility application (Windows only) supports updating drive firmware. (We will have more on this later).

The ID 3 means that that the target ID selector on the drive has been set to position 3. Do not use 0 or 7, they are reserved for the host adapter and computer. You must make each drive's target ID unique if it is on the same adapter channel as another drive. To make it easier to distinguish drives, you should make all target ID's unique. The 3:0 below the target ID signifies that the card is in slot 3 and the drive is connected to channel 0.

Bringing Drives On-Line

In order for drives to appear in the tape drive area, they must be powered on when the computer is initially booted, or can be brought on-line later by rebooting or by running the ATTO Configuration Tool. They do not need to have a tape mounted at that time, and having a tape in the process of loading while booting may confuse the initialization process for some older drives with out-of-date firmware.

One Application at a Time

Tape drive support is actually a Parallel SCSI application layer that is loaded with the application, and is not part of the resident I/O. The OS X resident code supports ONLY ONE Application at a time! That mean the application must seize control of the Parallel SCSI support and prevent all other applications from even seeing the drives. If the application behaves the drives will be relinquished when it quits, and everything will be fine for the next application. If memory is trashed, it is likely that the computer will demand to be shut down in half a dozen languages. This can easily happen if you try to use the wrong ATTO driver. (See the Installation Requirements for further instructions).

So beware if running DVD Studio Pro, Retrospect, DVDAfterEdit, and DDPAB on the same machine. Be sure and quit the other applications if they have reserved the tape drives you want to use.

Tape Drive vs. Tape Cartridge

The left half of the tape info describes the tape drive. Below the description is the current tape drive status. Each drive operation is displayed there, but normally you only see the last operation or ongoing operation, such as "Writing" or "Tape rewound".

The third line in the tape drive section shows the progress bar and a cancel button when an operation is in progress.

To the right we have a box containing the current tape cartridge information for each tape drive. It contains the information below, but only if a tape is loaded:

Volume Name

The volume name is a name that is written at the beginning of the tape, just after the characters "VOL1" which identify the tape as a DDP tape. It is often the same or similar to the DISC name that is to appear on the finished disc. Some applications write only the "VOL1", and leave the volume name blank.

III or IV

This identifies the tape cartridge type that is loaded. DLT III tapes are much slower than DLT IV tapes when used in a DLT7000 or DLT8000. If the tape is protected, a red vertical bar shows to the left of the tape type icon.

Load/Unload Button

This button is used to load or unload a tape at any time.

DDP Description

This summarizes the DDP information that is read from the DDPID or DDVID file at the beginning of the tape. The last number is the number of sectors on the tape layer. A tape can only contain a single layer. The number of sectors is the same whether or not CSS is applied - the number doesn't change, only the size of the sectors, which are either 2048 bytes or 2054 bytes.