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From: BRETT_GLASS@infoworld.com
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To: Simon Reading <aat81@dial.pipex.com>, gfoster@gfoster.com, grog@lemis.de
Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Subject: Recommend 8mm exabyte drives?
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> I'm considering 8mm exabyte as a (?more reliable) alternative to 4mm DAT.
> Would you recommend these drives?

> Regards

> Simon

I sure would. They're slow at random access, and at loading and unloading
tapes, but streaming data transfer rates are high and they're tough as
nails.  Spares are widely available, as are cleaning tapes and calibration
tools (which are similar to those for 8mm camcorders). You can even use
camcorder tapes in a pinch. (Your error rates will be higher, but since the
drive does a read-after-write it will catch errors on the fly and write the
data again during the same pass.)

I use a Tallgrass drive (which might as well be an Exabyte). It was OEMed
by Exabyte, which subsequently bought out Tallgrass. Each tape holds 5 GB
uncompressed and an average of 8 GB when you use the built-in STAC
compression chip. (GZIP compression seems to do better than LZS, though it
makes recovering from a dump tape more complicated.) The newer 8mm drives
can put even more on a tape and can read tapes made by older ones.

Probably the best thing about these drives is that, since they've been
around for years, every OS and tape backup program known to Mankind has a
driver for them. 

The model I own has one minor flaw: while it's executing certain SCSI
commands (such as "rewind") it just doesn't respond to additional ones.  
Some tape software for DOS and Windows is confused by this behavior. But
most programs and drivers are aware of this limitation.

--Brett