From owner-freebsd-hardware Wed Jan 24 10:18:59 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA09750 for hardware-outgoing; Wed, 24 Jan 1996 10:18:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from pelican.com (pelican.com [134.24.4.62]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA09728 for ; Wed, 24 Jan 1996 10:18:38 -0800 (PST) Received: by pelican.com (Smail3.1.29.1 #10) id m0tf9m8-0000SaC; Wed, 24 Jan 96 10:18 PST Message-Id: Date: Wed, 24 Jan 96 10:18 PST From: pete@pelican.com (Pete Carah) To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: QIC-3080: density & length In-Reply-To: <199601220134.MAA16967@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Sender: owner-hardware@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk In article <199601220134.MAA16967@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> msmith writes: >C. O'Donnell stands accused of saying: >> I have purchased a Conner TSM4000R SCSI tape backup unit. I have >> found this unit mentioned several times in questions in the mail >> archives, but unfortunately the replies must have been sent >> directly, and not forwarded to the list. > >Odd, I've read lots of people saying that they're lemons. Sorry. Well, I was never able to get one to stream on a SS1000 that easily streams a DLT (10g version) on the same otherwise-unused scsi port. (nice having 3 scsi ports on your machine :-) (a customer brought the drive in and wanted his data dumped to it instead of our default DLT). This was long (1/2 gb) files that have no problems with streaming in either Sun's tar or gtar onto the DLT. The source drive was a sparc storage-array that is certainly both fast enough, and not on the same scsi port as the tape (since it isn't on a scsi port at all)... If you need speed and don't worry about $$$ I'd recommend a DLT, though I've never tried one (directly; with /etc/rmt it won't stream from either fbsd or a SS20 but I'd expect that) on freebsd either :-) As long as fbsd's tape driver can handle variable blocksize it should be fine. We went to the trouble of writing a shared-memory stream program and still couldn't get the Connor drive going fast with gtar (usually better) or Sun's tar. There is one problem with Solaris of a 65k dma limit on the blocked-tape driver; this may be the problem but it doesn't seem to bother a QIC525 drive. I've never tried one on freebsd but this one experience hasn't encouraged me. -- Pete