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Date:      Wed, 4 Nov 1998 08:28:14 -0800 (PST)
From:      David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com>
To:        spork@super-g.com
Cc:        freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: DLT or AIT?
Message-ID:  <199811041628.IAA17856@pau-amma.whistle.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.00.9811032317390.12762-100000@super-g.inch.com>

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>Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 23:27:46 -0500 (EST)
>From: spork <spork@super-g.com>

>We're looking to replace the DAT drive on our backup machine with either a
>DLT or AIT.  Does anyone have any experience with the AIT drives?  Any
>favorites when it comes to the DLTs?

We recently (about 2 months ago) got an ADIC DLT 4000 7-slot autoloader.

It has been working well, with the following caveats:

* Hardware compression is on by default.  To turn it off, I have been
  told that I need to manually press a button just before the first file
  of a tape is written.  Naturally, I find this obnoxious.  (I was
  informed just yesterday afternoon thaht there may be a way to do this
  via SCSI commands, so there's some hope that this isn't going to be
  quite so annoying.)  (Reason I want compression off is that I'm using
  amanda, and I do compression on the client side, before the data
  traverse our network.  And we have a couple of largish filesystems
  that are mostly gzipped tarballs....)

* There was a firmware "gotcha" -- if the device had been powered on,
  but then power was removed, when power was restored, it stayed turned
  off.  Oops.  We ended up RMAing the unit to replace the firmware -- I
  refuse to rely on procedures that involve the use of Microsoft code
  for anything important.  (ADIC paid for the drop-ship, so our downtime
  was rather minimal.)  And that shouldn't bite anyone now.

* From a software perspective, I'm accustomed to numbering things (such
  as slots on an autoloader) starting from 0; thus, we'd have slots 0 -
  6 for this device.  Well, the device itslef (both in the firmaware &
  the physical embossed slot designations) uses 1 - 7.  Yes, tis is
  minor -- but I'm hoping to document things enough that someone would
  be able to deal with the device if I should go on vacation or
  something.

Jason Thorpe's "chio" driver (& friends) work just fine with the device.

It is claimed that the drive in the auto-loader is field-replaceable, so
one could upgrade from a DLT 4000 to a DLT 7000.  I have *not* tried
this myself.

Hope this is useful,
david
-- 
David Wolfskill		UNIX System Administrator
dhw@whistle.com		voice: (650) 577-7158	pager: (650) 371-4621

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