Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 07 Jul 1999 15:16:31 -0700
From:      Jon Drukman <jsd@gamespot.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   HP T4000s Tape Drive problems
Message-ID:  <4.1.19990707144132.0095aad0@hudsucker.gamespot.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I've got one of these HP Colorado T4000s SCSI tape drives on my FreeBSD
3.1-RELEASE system and it's driving me crazy.  It uses Travan TR-4 tapes.

It identifies itself fine on bootup:

sa0: <HP T4000s 1.07> Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device 
sa0: 3.300MB/s transfers

However, reading and writing is painfully slow.  Much worse than the
3.3M/sec listed above - more like 50K/sec.  It seems to "shoeshine" while
operating, which indicates to me that the blocksize is wrong.  Any attempts
to set the blocksize, however, result in SCSI errors:

hudsucker: mt blocksize 0
mt: /dev/nrsa0: blocksize: Invalid argument

(and in syslog:)

Jul  7 14:50:18 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): MODE SELECT(06). CDB:
15 0 0 0 c 0 
Jul  7 14:50:18 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:26,0
Jul  7 14:50:18 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): Invalid field in
parameter list

If I run dd with bs set to something big like 131072, I get this error:

dd if=url.ISD of=/dev/nrsa0 bs=131072
dd: /dev/nrsa0: Invalid argument
71+1 records in
71+0 records out
9306112 bytes transferred in 20.616995 secs (451381 bytes/sec)

and in syslog:

Jul  7 15:06:47 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): Invalid request.
Fixed block device requests must be a multiple of 512 bytes
Jul  7 15:07:11 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): SPACE. CDB: 11 1 ff ff
ff 0 
Jul  7 15:07:11 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:2c,0
Jul  7 15:07:11 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): Command sequence error
Jul  7 15:07:11 hudsucker /kernel: (sa0:ahc0:0:5:0): unable to backspace
over one of double filemarks at EOD- opting for safety

(funny, i thought 131072 was a multiple of 512.)

even worse than the slowness is the fact that it just doesn't seem to work
properly.  i copied the file above using dd, but restoring it doesn't give
the same file back!  it's truncated (and not at a multiple of 512 either.)

ideas appreciated.

thanks.



Jon Drukman
Director Of Technology
GameSpot


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4.1.19990707144132.0095aad0>