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From: Bob Willcox <bob@luke.pmr.com>
Message-Id: <199602132206.QAA18341@luke.pmr.com>
Subject: Re: Exabyte 8200
To: fcawth@jjarray.umd.edu (Fred Cawthorne)
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 16:06:22 -0600 (CST)
Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199602132046.PAA00282@jjarray.umd.edu> from "Fred Cawthorne" at Feb 13, 96 03:46:38 pm
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Fred Cawthorne wrote:
> 
> 
> I have just upgraded the firmware in my Exabyte 8200 drive to a newer
> version, and now it at least works with FreeBSD-current...  The problem
> is that it is streaming very slowly.  It isn't stopping and going, but it
> only writes about 60-80 K/second.  I have heard that people use this
> drive, and I wanted to know if there are any special modes to select or
> anything.  Do people ever get resonable speeds with this drive??
> I know this thing is old but it seems that it should be able to write a 
> 2 gig tape in under 6 hours...
> 
> Any information would be appreciated...

I have several of these that I use on 2.1-stable systems w/o any
(major) problems.  Performance is right at the theroetical limit
of 240kb/sec.  Mine are connected to NCR 810 controllers.  I use
them with dump, tar, cpio, and afio.  Sometimes when I feel like
it I will pipe the output through team to the drive (though I
don't think it really changes the performance any).

The problems that I do have with the drives is one of positioning
to different files down the tape.  When I dump to them I will place
multiple file systems on a single tape as multiple tape files (as
many as will fit in the 2gb).  This works ok, but it is a real pain
to get restore to properly locate the desired tape file.  So far,
I've yet to fail to get the file I need when really necesary, but
is is never easy (and I really don't know why...it should be easy,
the documentation makes it sound easy).


>  Fred.
> 


-- 
Bob Willcox
bob@luke.pmr.com (or obiwan%bob@uunet.uu.net)
Austin, TX