Date: Sun, 31 Aug 1997 13:37:47 +0930 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: mjacob@feral.com Cc: mike@smith.net.au, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG, richard@pegasus.com Subject: Re: Is this (SCSI) tape drive compatible with FreeBSD? Message-ID: <199708310407.NAA01035@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 30 Aug 1997 19:11:57 MST." <199708310211.TAA00598@ns.feral.com>
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> >>>A 250meg capacity is awfully small today, and the tapes are too expensive. > >>>They're also excruciatingly slow. > >> > >> This isn't even 250Meg. It's QIC-120 (120Meg) or QIC-150. > >> > > > >The Viper 150 will happily read and write the 250 and 525MB > >extended-length tapes. > > > > Very interesting. This wasn't qualified by Sun, that I recall. > I'd check to see whether it's a 2150S or a 2150. A/the Australian Archive (before they were bought) service agent (Peridata) qualified them on both the original head and the current replacement part. The wear characteristics are nonstandard, but appear to be within acceptable tolerances. It's possible that Sun either didn't bother to qualify the extended-length media, tried but decided the wear profile was "different" and therefore bad, or that the 2150 stopped being a mainstream product before it was worth the effort. > The drives aren't *that* robust- I'd say an old 9 track is > more robust, mechanical, not vacuum. It's data density is very low though. I wasn't comparing them to a 1/2" transport, but rather to a 4mm or 8mm mechanism. You will note that, in fact, I specifically mentioned that the only commercially active 1/2" transport currently on the market (DLT) was probably *more* robust. mike
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