ps@tut.fi (Pertti Suomela) (02/22/90)
Does anyone of you net.people know where I can get software support (device driver and whatever needed) for Exabyte 8mm video tape system? The tape recorder has a SCSI-interface and we can connect it to a 9000/840 or a 9000/370. If you have any experience of this kind of a backup system, I would be more than interested to hear of it. HP has a DAT tape recorder with a SCSI-interface but can I use it in any other system (as we may want to do) than in a HP? Any experience of this one? As I understand the situation, the 8mm tape system is more widely used and a de facto standard in tape systems, right? Any opinions pro or cons of these two (DAT or 8mm video) systems? -- Pertti Suomela Tampere University of Technology Control Engineering Laboratory ps@tut.fi PO Box 527, SF-33101 Tampere, Finland ps@fintut.bitnet Work: +358-31-162650, Fax: +358-31-162340
paulp@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Paul Perlmutter) (03/03/90)
The 7.0 release of HP-UX for the S300 supports the new 4mm product. The 8mm Exabyte product which has been on the market for somewhat more than a year is now being aggressively challenged by a variety of 4mm vendors - including HP. I doubt if you could claim it is the "defacto" standard. It merely had the lead, which I believe will erode quickly given the advantages of 4mm. In a very short time, 4mm should be out-selling 8mm. Will Exabyte work with 7.0? It has not been carefully tested on HP-UX systems. But Exabyte does claim to support the SCSI I standard. The S300 HP-UX tape driver is a full implementation of the SCSI sequential-access standard. I personally would not use any sequential access device on any earlier release of HP-UX (6.5 or earlier). It is not supported, it is documented to avoid doing this, and problems could very well be anticipated. > HP has a DAT tape recorder with a SCSI-interface but can I use it in > any other system (as we may want to do) than in a HP? Any experience > of this one? The HP DAT device should plug-and-play with most host systems that implement the SCSI sequential acess protocol. You could run into problems if the tape driver in these systems took advantage of any vendor-unique commands that are available on Exabyte, or QIC tapes. My experience is that drivers distributed from host systems will plug-and-play fairly well, while drivers for Exabytes distributed by 8mm VAR vendors will use Exabyte vendor-unique functionality, and consequently will not work with HP's DAT. Cheers, Paul Perlmutter paulp@hpfcla
cheeks@edsr.eds.com (Mark Costlow) (03/07/90)
In article <5570383@hpfcdc.HP.COM>, paulp@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Paul Perlmutter) writes: > > The 7.0 release [...] supports the new 4mm product. The 8mm Exabyte > product [...] is now being aggressively challenged by a variety > of 4mm vendors - including HP. I doubt if you could claim it is > the "defacto" standard. It merely had the lead, which I believe > will erode quickly given the advantages of 4mm. In a very short ???^^^^??? > time, 4mm should be out-selling 8mm. > Which advantages would those be? Slower transfer speeds, or smaller capacity? I don't mean to sound snide (I'm not doing a very good job am I? :-), but I have seen several claims like this, but have yet to understand what they mean. What does DAT have that helical scan doesn't? (Aside from huge delays in product shipment - like you said, the Exabyte's been around for over a year ... their *2nd* wave of products is due Summer-ish I think ...). Anyway, anything you can say to enlighten me will be appreciated. > Cheers, > Paul Perlmutter > paulp@hpfcla Disclaimer: I am NOT associated with Exabyte in any way shape or form, except that I've used their tape drives. cheeks@edsr.eds.com or ...uunet!edsr!cheeks
paulp@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Paul Perlmutter) (03/14/90)
PQP> The 7.0 release [...] supports the new 4mm product. The 8mm Exabyte PQP> product [...] is now being aggressively challenged by a variety PQP> of 4mm vendors - including HP. I doubt if you could claim it is PQP> the "defacto" standard. It merely had the lead, which I believe PQP> will erode quickly given the advantages of 4mm. In a very short PQP> time, 4mm should be out-selling 8mm. > Which advantages would those be? Slower transfer speeds, or smaller > capacity? I don't mean to sound snide (I'm not doing a very good job > am I? :-) Actually, you are sounding a bit snide. But I'll let it pass, and try to answer your questions. Exabyte marketing focuses in on size and capacity, but I claim that it is too simplistic a picture, and users are getting misled. Let me give an analogy: it's like buying a car and getting fooled into focusing on an engine that is bigger and faster, forgetting that you never needed engines of that size - and there is a whole lot more to a car than large engines. I think it is undeniable that 8mm has captured part of the market. But I think 4mm is better, it will become the defacto standard, and here to stay for some of these reasons: - 4mm is being aggressively marketed by both mechanism manufacturers and system integrators. *Already* we have 3.5" mechs on the market, half-height mechs, and the future is extremely bright with extremely low cost products in the very near future. Exabyte simply will not penetrate the low-end market because of their high-cost, form factor requirements. 4mm will totally dominate PC/Unix, other PC platforms, and low-end workstations! I claim in about one year Exabyte will be considered a "high-priced" solution! I claim that customers will want low-cost, high-reliability backup. This is what 4mm gives us. DAT is big enough, fast enough, and customers will focus in on the more important features such as: - lower cost - smaller form factor - partition support - fast search - Exabyte has some serious limitations: when you insert a tape into the mechanism, you can have a coffee break before it is loaded. Repositioning and ejecting cartridges is also unpleasantly tedious. Their 270 degree wrap angle causes reliability problems. (4mm uses 90 degree.) - Exabyte is the sole vendor of 8mm, and SONY is the sole manufacturer of 8mm. And that scares me. If Exabyte has a fire - poof, there goes production for a year. If SONY backs out for whatever reason, 8mm is dead. - Is 'size' the issue? I have only rarely seen systems that require 2 GBytes of storage. Remember too, that size varies dramatically on Exabyte tapes due to their implementation. So, 2 Gbytes is actually unusual, with smaller capacities very common. 4mm more reliably gives you 1.3 gbytes. Tapes are so incredibly cheap, that I find almost everyone merely archives their data onto a small portion of the tape and never reuses that tape! People continue to be misled by capacity: Exabyte requires 2 MBytes per file mark! Their error recovery is abysmal, and takes megabytes of capacity to recover. - About transfer speeds - Exabyte is a little faster. But let's look at the whole picture. I have seen users of Exabytes wait for hours and hours to recover a file. And this is no exaggeration. 4mm with fast-search will require a few minutes. The point is, I don't care how fast I transfer data as long as it is quick - since I do it at night. I care *very much* how long it takes to recover since I do that during the day! Transfer time is such a misleading concept. It's recovery time that is critical for me. And remember too: Exabyte claims 15 MBytes/min while DDS claims 11 MBytes/min. But when you consider the time cost in writing out file marks, or error-recovery for Exabyte, the speeds drop off. 4mm takes no data space for tape marks, and error recovery is light years ahead of 8mm.
kc@hprnd.HP.COM (Kurt Chan) (03/15/90)
> - Exabyte is the sole vendor of 8mm, and SONY is the sole > manufacturer of 8mm. And that scares me. If Exabyte has a > fire - poof, there goes production for a year. If SONY backs > out for whatever reason, 8mm is dead. ^^^ Did you mean 4mm, Paul? BTW, thanks for this enlightening info - some little-known facts about our sequential access alternatives! Also, - do you know what the comparative media costs are? - how about comparative media reliability and how often "recovered errors" occur on each?