FreeBSD supports EIDE, SATA, SCSI, and SAS drives (with a compatible controller; see the next section), and all drives using the original “Western Digital” interface (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and of course IDE). A few ESDI controllers that use proprietary interfaces may not work: stick to WD1002/3/6/7 interfaces and clones.
FreeBSD supports SCSI and QIC-36 (with a QIC-02 interface). This includes 8-mm (aka Exabyte) and DAT drives.
Some of the early 8-mm drives are not quite compatible with SCSI-2, and may not work well with FreeBSD.
FreeBSD supports SCSI changers using the ch(4) device and the chio(1) command. The details of how you actually control the changer can be found in the chio(1) manual page.
If you are not using AMANDA or some other product that already understands changers, remember that they only know how to move a tape from one point to another, so you need to keep track of which slot a tape is in, and which slot the tape currently in the drive needs to go back to.
Any SCSI drive connected to a supported controller is supported. Most ATAPI compatible IDE CD-ROMs are supported.
FreeBSD supports any ATAPI-compatible IDE CD-R or CD-RW drive. See burncd(8) for details.
FreeBSD also supports any SCSI CD-R or CD-RW drives. Install and use cdrecord from the ports or packages system, and make sure that you have the pass device compiled in your kernel.