Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 10:20:21 +0200 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is this (SCSI) tape drive compatible with FreeBSD? Message-ID: <19970906102021.YZ35994@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199708310611.UAA14714@pegasus.com>; from Richard Foulk on Aug 30, 1997 20:11:32 -1000 References: <mike@smith.net.au> <199708310611.UAA14714@pegasus.com>
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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... 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). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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