easy way to determine if a stream or fd is seekable

[David Brodbeck]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 4:13 AM, Stefan Esser <se at freebsd.org> wrote:

> I have no idea, whether tape drives are still in wide use. For the
> purposes that I administrated and used tapes for (gamma/particle
> coincidence spectroscopy and large numerical simulations), large disk
> arrays have completely replaced tape storage. Disk drives are cheaper
> than tape cartridges, today ...
>
>
>From what I've seen, tape for *backup* is mostly going away; disk-to-disk
backup is as cheap or cheaper and much faster.  Tape for *archival*,
however, is still alive and well; when you have many petabytes of data that
you're required to keep in storage forever, but may or may not ever need to
read again, tape still looks more attractive.  In big installations the
tape drives are often buffered by disk arrays to minimize backup time and
allow the tape drives to stream more effectively.

You also still see tape used a lot for offsite backups, although as
Internet speeds have gone up more and more of that is happening by sending
bits across the network instead of tapes over the highway.  The bandwidth
of the proverbial station wagon full of tapes is no longer quite as
impressive as it used to be. ;)

-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington