From owner-freebsd-hardware  Sat Aug 30 16:00:23 1997
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Date: Sat, 30 Aug 1997 12:59:41 -1001
From: richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk)
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In-Reply-To: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl>
       "Re: Is this (SCSI) tape drive compatible with FreeBSD?" (Aug 29, 11:52pm)
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To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Is this (SCSI) tape drive compatible with FreeBSD?
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} > I'm about to acquire an Archive Viper 2150S, (a SCSI-1 tapedrive).  Is
} > this device compatible with FreeBSD's scsitape driver?  (i.e. will I be
} > able to use dump, tar, cpio, etc. to do backup/restores with it, or
} > archive files, whatnot?)
} 
} I use one with FreeBSD2.2.1R without problems. Has been working since
} 386BSD 0.1 or so ;-)

Compatible perhaps, but not a very good deal -- even if it's free.

A 250meg capacity is awfully small today, and the tapes are too expensive.
They're also excruciatingly slow.

Figure out how many tapes you might reasonably buy over the life of the
drive and then see what the real cost is.

DATs and Exabytes are usually a much better deal.  I prefer Exabytes.


Richard