Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 09:45:31 +0800 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Jeff Wheat <jeff@cetlink.net> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, michael dorin <mike@chaski.com>, David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> Subject: Re: cheap cheap 4mm tape drive wanted Message-ID: <19971212094531.43742@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.971211114007.jeff@cetlink.net>; from Jeff Wheat on Thu, Dec 11, 1997 at 11:33:43AM -0500 References: <19971211141108.64729@lemis.com> <XFMail.971211114007.jeff@cetlink.net>
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On Thu, Dec 11, 1997 at 11:33:43AM -0500, Jeff Wheat wrote: > > On 11-Dec-97 Greg Lehey wrote: >>> http://www.corpsys.com has had good prices on DDS drives in the past >>> but I haven't seen any in the past year. >> >> They've been offering an Archive 4586 autochange for some time now. >> The current price is #379. See more details on >> http://www.corpsys.com/cgi-bin/select?282585099339485&specials&4586NPR. >> I have one of these drives, and so far it's been the most reliable DDS >> drive I've ever had (daily 8 hour backups for a year now). By >> contrast, the HP drives are unreliable. You should definitely avoid >> the old DDS-1 drives, which never lasted more than 6 months for me. >> >>> After chewing up two WangDAT 3100's I've always been happy with the >>> Archive drives. And I was very happy when Seagate shipped the SCSI >>> programmer's guide for free when I asked for it. > > Hi there. I just recently bought two of the 4586 drives from > corpsys.com and have had to return 3 of them so far. They seem to die > when doing dumps after about 4 hours into the dumps. I have them setup > under FreeBSD 2.2.5 with an Adaptec 2940UW controller. I have tried to > use the changer script from corpsys.com's ftp site and it trashed my hard > drives due to what seems to be changes to the scsi command itself. If you > could send me any information on how to use these drives with 120meter > dds2 tapes and amanda backup software I would be very grateful. I would > really hate to return these drives. Well, I don't use dump or amanda. They're fine for backups, but frequently I need to grab a backup tape and read it in on a system somewhere else, and you can't rely on the other system having a compatible dump or amanda. That's why I use tar, which is pretty universal. Having said that, your symptoms as you describe them don't look like they obviously point to the drive being faulty. I don't use the changer scripts: you can move to the next cartridge with 'mt offline', and that's all I need to do. Could you describe the way the drives "die"? Does that mean they never work again? What I do is basically: TAPE=/dev/nrst0 export TAPE tar c /filesys1 tar c /filesys2 tar c /filesys3 mt rewind # Make a list of what I wrote tar tv >filesys1 tar tv >filesys2 tar tv >filesys3 mt offline In fact, of course, there's a little more shell trickery than that, but that's all that affects the tape drive. As I said, it works fine. Why don't you try my method next time a drive "dies", and see if it still works this way. Greg
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