Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 13:34:22 -0600 (CST) From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de> To: BRETT_GLASS@infoworld.com Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD hardware Users) Subject: Re: Recommend 8mm exabyte drives? Message-ID: <199701101934.NAA00357@papillon.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <9700098528.AA852846957@ccgate.infoworld.com> from "BRETT_GLASS@infoworld.com" at "Jan 9, 97 02:53:22 pm"
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BRETT_GLASS@infoworld.com writes: >> 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. I don't see that they're any faster than modern DDS-2 drives. And I wish I could agree about reliability. But they have a slight advantage over DDS drives in terms of capacity (not surprising, considering the relative size of the cassette). > 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.) As a bitten child (I'm currently returning my repaired 8500 because it still didn't work right), I'm not convinced. Note also that I've been told by product experts that you should only use original Exabyte or Sony (same thing, different label) cleaning tapes. > 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. At least Tandem supports only DDS drives. I'd guess that HP does the same :-) But why do you need a driver? On the systems I use, I can replace a DDS drive with a QIC-525 or an Exabyte, and I don't need to tell the software anything. > 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. Does this worry you? You might check the Exabyte web pages, though--you can pick up firmware upgrades that might solve this problem. Greg
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