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From: BRETT_GLASS@infoworld.com
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To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Recommend 8mm exabyte drives?
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> As a bitten child (I'm currently returning my repaired 8500 because it
> still didn't work right), I'm not convinced.

Perhaps the person who repaired your drive did not do it properly.

> 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.

As long as the cleaning cartridge has a ratchet to keep tape from being
re-used, it'll work fine, regardless of brand. Of course, the "product
experts" are a bit biased in favor of the ones they sell.

> At least Tandem supports only DDS drives.  I'd guess that HP does the
> same :-)

I used HP systems with Exabyte drives long before DDS.

> 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.

If you stick to the most generic SCSI tape commands, nearly anything will
work. But if you want control of compression, etc., you want a driver that
understands what can be done with the medium and the drive. This is true of
DDS, too, if you want to use some of the niftier random-access features.

> You might check the Exabyte web pages, though--you can pick up firmware
> upgrades that might solve this problem.

Will have to check on this. The older Exabytes used somewhat "dumb" SCSI
chipsets, though (even now, there aren't many good ones available for
targets). So it may not be possible to keep the drive from ignoring SCSI
commands while it's working.

--Brett