Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 01:55:04 -0800 (PST) From: dan@math.berkeley.edu (Dan Strick) To: dburr@POBoxes.com, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: dan@math.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: Info wanted: Exabyte EXB-8500 Message-ID: <199803290955.BAA28477@math.berkeley.edu>
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> I'm considering the purchase of an Exabyte EXB-8500 tape drive to go with > my FreeBSD system, since I need a decent backup device (Zip disks just > ain't cutting it anymore, especially since I got this new 4.3 GB drive...) > > I thought I'd consult the FreeBSD community, before making my purchase. I > have the following questions: > > 1. Does this drive work OK with FreeBSD? Any weird behavior or other > gotcha's that I should be aware of? > > 2. Will it work with an Adaptec AHA-2940AU PCI UltraSCSI (narrow) adapter? > > 3. Is anyone using this combo? How's it work? > > 4. (I figure I might as well ask this while I've got your attention) > My source for this drive is someone posting in misc.forsale.*. Now, I > usually have pretty good luck buying from the net (in fact, I have had no > ripoffs to date), but this is primarily due to me carefully reading the ad, > judging the person's character, etc. One of the "warning flags" that I > look for is a "too good to be true" price, which usually means that the 1) I have in the past (circa FreeBSD release 2.0.5) used both the EXB-8500 and the EXB-8505 (same thing in half height) on FreeBSD systems. I don't recall any problems. 2) I used the Adaptec 154x ISA controllers at the time. I would be very 3) surprised to find incompatibility with a modern PCI controller. 4) The 8500 is a *very* old drive. I would expect this one to be very well worn and that suggests that the drive will exhibit a high soft error rate that verges on occasional hard errors. The tape heads on these things just wear out. The official specification for 8500 tape head lifetime is something like 2000 tape-motion-hours. Expect this tape drive to require more frequent and more expensive maintenance than a vintage BMW. If you do decide to get the EXB-8500, make sure it is really an EXB-8500C (with data compression) and was not upgraded from a plain EXB-8500. The original EXB-8500s had too slow an internal processor to keep up with the tape, causing lots of tape overruns. Dan Strick dan@math.berkeley.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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