Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 20:13:08 +0200 (MET DST) From: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is this (SCSI) tape drive compatible with FreeBSD? Message-ID: <199709061813.UAA00623@yedi.iaf.nl> In-Reply-To: <19970906102021.YZ35994@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Sep 6, 97 10:20:21 am
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As J Wunsch wrote... > As Richard Foulk wrote: > > > I suppose you could say that QIC was more robust back when they were > > more widely used and less data was being archived. In today's world > > they're not all that robust when compared to the alternatives. > > This is an old religious war, and i won't continue it myself except > for this mail. > > QIC still *is* more robust than any helical-scan technology. DAT > being worst, the drives usually don't last longer than 1.5 years when > being used on a daily basis (and this was with the older, better > quality HP drives, the toys that are built these days often don't > survive a couple of months). Media often fail after a couple of > years, seen this personally with the DAT cartridges of a customer (and > they did have spare copies). 8 mm Exabyte comes next, but still, it's > helical scan, and once you've looked inside these drives with its > about 10 different motors, and dozens of wheels in it, you start > distrusting them if you've got the slightes feeling for mechanics. > Complete this exercise by reading Exabyte's recommendation for how to > remove a jamming cassette. :-) Needless to say, chances are good that > you're damaging this cassette when removing... Chances are 100% in my book. I do have some experience doing it and it's a royal pain in the b*tt. > The general opinion of quite a number of people is that longit- > udinally-recording drives (QIC, DLT, MLT (sp?)) are much more robust, > becuase of them being KISS. QIC ain't dead either, i'm not the only > one using it, and there are drives available up to 10 or 20 GB as well > (which still can read and write the old QIC-150 cartridges). I have yet to loose a QIC tape. Even DLT can get mangled, most of the times this is from people dropping cartridges or getting the leader pickup thingie in the drive coming loose from it's hook. Easy to fix if you know what you're doing. I have an Exabyte 8200, a DLT2000 and a Tandberg 2Gb QIC drive so I can do some comparing. As you can guess I like the DLT best ;-) _ ____________________________________________________________________ | / o / / _ Bulte email: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl http://www.tcja.nl/~wilko |/|/ / / /( (_) Arnhem, The Netherlands - Do, or do not. There is no 'try' ----------------------------------------------------------------------Yoda
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