avruch@alioth.MIT.EDU (Max Avruch) (12/06/90)
We recently purchased an Exabyte tape drive to make data transfer
between the observatory and our computer easier, and to make
short-term backups (not archive tapes).
However, we've heard that some 8mm video tapes are better than
others for data storage. Does anyone have any advice on this topic?
We are interested in information on :
1) 2-hr and 15-min length tapes. If you can,
please name (brand) names.
2) Where to get them. Have you had any good/bad experiences
with particular mail order firms or retail outlets?
3) Any other miscellaneous information you would like to share.
Please respond to avruch@alioth.mit.edu. I will compile a
summary of the responses and post it to comp.periphs. (If you request
a copy in your response I'll mail it to you). Thanks in advance.
-Ian Avruch avruch@alioth.mit.eduavruch@altair.MIT.EDU (Max Avruch) (12/15/90)
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for information on 8mm data
tapes. Briefly, the results seem to be that almost everyone prefers Sony,
either because they've had bad experiences with other brands or know people
who have. Of those expressing an opinion:
Sony: approx. 15 recommendations. No real problems
TDK: one endorsement, one warning
Maxell: two warnings
Fuji: one endorsement
People I have spoken to also recommend Sony, and one person has personally
used Maxell tapes and found them to be adequate.
-Max Avruch
------------------------------------
The following is an edited summary of people's comments:
____________________________________________________________________________
sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) :
Recommends Sony tapes. Has heard people say "don't even think of getting
anything else." Buy tape cleaning cartridges from Exabyte and use them
every couple of weeks.
____________________________________________________________________________
ron%hercules@as.arizona.edu (Ron Watkins) :
(ron@argus.lpl.arizona.edu)
Has been using Sony p6-120MP for more than 2 years and has never lost any
data.
____________________________________________________________________________
melka@ast.dsd.northrop.com (John F. Melka) :
Uses 8mm for storage backup. Reports that _Consumer Reports_ rated 8mm
video tapes (for video work) and found Sony the best. Had been having
dropout problems with another brand (name not given) that disappeared with
Sony. Recommends keeping the drive clean and retiring tapes after about 50
uses.
____________________________________________________________________________
edward@ginger.Berkeley.EDU (Edward Wang) :
Grapevine says Sony. Use the more expensive cleaning tapes from
Exabyte. The best price around Berkeley is Price Club.
There might be news on this subject occasionally in comp.sys.sun archive.
____________________________________________________________________________
jt@deltam.com (Jim Wills) :
After many hours of testing found Sony P6-120MP, Sony P6-120HG, and
Exabyte's tapes to be the best. Other brands leave more of a film on the
tape heads. Spoke to an engineer at Exabyte who said that the Exabyte Brand
tape was in fact a Sony tape made to company specs. He buys from
Teammark International Inc.
2283 Paragon Drive
San Jose, Ca. 95131-1307
(408)436-0500 (voice)
and gets a price break for ordering in quantity.
____________________________________________________________________________
seymour@milton.u.washington.edu (Richard Seymour) :
Uses Sony P6-120-MP exclusively, buys them at local video stores for about
$6 each (qty 10). Has found that about 1 tape in 30 is bad, a number that
seems to be increasing. Exabyte tapes are not immune from errors, either.
____________________________________________________________________________
murthy_j@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Jayant Murthy) :
Has been using Sony Video 8 tapes bought at Caldors for about $6.50 each.
____________________________________________________________________________
@warper.jhuapl.edu:GOTWOLS@STR.DECnet (Bruce Gotwols):
Has just completed a month-long experiment storing data on an Exabyte drive
with uncertified Sony P6-120MP tapes, and encountered no problems with the
tape drive or the tapes. Has also used the certified tapes Exabyte sells,
but they seemed identical in performance (certification means some number of
tapes from a batch are tested). Recommends Sony tapes.
____________________________________________________________________________
se@ikp.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser) :
(In Europe, tapes are named P5-xxx because of different video systems.)
Has used SONY P5-90MP with good results. Has also used TDK P5-90MP, which
seemed to have a lower error rate. The TDK E-HG90 tapes are comparable to
the Sonys (i.e. higher error rate)
____________________________________________________________________________
leka@milo.IFA.Hawaii.Edu (K.D.Leka) :
Has used Sony Video 8 (120min) "P6-120MP" tapes almost exclusively, and has
had very few problems with them (<6 out of ~1000 tapes). Has had problems
reading tapes written by different drives; there _may_ be a sensitivity
to drive-head alignment.
____________________________________________________________________________
@encore.encore.com:terryk@pinocchio.encore.com (Terence Kelleher) :
Recommends only buying brand names. The price difference between 2hr tapes
and shorter ones is so small that stores don't bother to stock them. Most
will special order them for quantities > 10.
____________________________________________________________________________
steinly@tapir.Caltech.EDU (Steinn Sigurdsson) :
Uses Sony 8, P6-120MP, and has never had any real problems. Buys them at
Fedco cheap.
_____________________________________________________________________________
dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.com (Steve Dyer) :
Athena gets them at Crimson Tech
_____________________________________________________________________________
think!ames!amdcad!netcom!garvey@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Joseph Garvey) :
Recently bought Exabyte tapes from ATS (a part of Anthem Electronics). The
112 meter tapes (2.3 GB on series 8200) cost $20 each for qty 5, half as
much as Exabyte charges (for the same tape, down to the label).
They take credit cards. 800-359-3580. Cleaning tapes went for $15 each, qty
3.
_____________________________________________________________________________
jpe@egr.duke.edu (John P. Eisenmenger)
Bought 100 SONY P6-120MP from "CCD" at about $5.50 per tape.
Has kindly included the results of an earlier survey:
Here is a summary of responses to my query last week. Thanks again to all
who repsonded.
ORIGINAL QUERY:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Am working on an application (Unix workstation backup) that will require
hundreds of 8mm cartridges. Would appreciate information on suppliers,
brands, prices, and quality.
Would also be interested in experience with failure modes when low cost
video-quality cartridges are used: irrecoverable write errors, lower data
rates due to excessive error recovery, irrecoverable read errors, drive or
head damage?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everyone seems to use Sony commercial grade cartridges (P6-120MP). One (very
large) site has started using Fuji commercial grade as well. Price range:
$5 < x <$9 depending on supplier and volume. Problems with other brands
(except
Fuji) were cited. Nobody used expensive ($30) "certified" cartridges. Few
problems with Sony commercial grade cartridges were mentioned except an
occasional (~1 out of 40) "bad" tape exhibiting high write error rates.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITED RESPONSES (please assume standard disclaimers for all):
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: rkh@mtune.ATT.COM (Robert Halloran)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exabyte (currently the only 8mm drive mfr) only sanctions the use of their
own 'certified' tapes (at $30 each) or Sony consumer tapes (at about $7-8
for 120 minute/2 Gb). We had tried Maxell tapes and had problems with
dropouts, unreadable backups, tape jams, etc. We have had almost no such
problems since converting to Sony blanks.
I DON'T speak officially for AT&T here; just as a user of 8mm drives and
having tried different brands of tape in same.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: hanson@fnal.gov (Steve Hanson)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, here at Fermi we use thousands of 8mm tapes for data collection,
mostly on VMS boxes, but also on UNIX boxes. Some of the people here
did a tape study and as far as I know what they found out was that
Sony and Fuji were both much more reliable than the other brands. We
are on a continuous merry-go-round with getting revisions to the drives,
etc. Apparently we have about 5% of the Exabytes in the field, so we
are in close contact with the Exabyte people. We seem to have a lot
more trouble with bugs in the drive firmware acting up under VMS than
UNIX. Anyhow, what people who did the stuff here say is buy Sony or
Fuji tapes and you should be okay.
We use the plain old ordinary consumer models of both the Sony and
Fuji tapes. We tend to buy a few thousand at a time, so we get
pretty good pricing on them. Lately we've been getting Fuji, I think
just on price basis. I personally have used the Maxell and TDK tapes,
and have found that they work but you seem to be more likely to have
more soft errors, which I would take as a bad sign. The tests they did
here seemed to concur.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Bob Jewett <jewett@hpl-opus.hpl.hp.com>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I use Sony P6-120MP. Rumors against other brands keep me from trying them.
I buy from CCD, San Leandro CA, phone 1-415-352-3202. Cost is < $6/tape.
I have seen between 0.2 and 20.0 write errors per megabyte with the Sony
tapes. I think the change in data rate is insignificant. I allow for
possible expansion of the data due to the correction blocks when writing an
archive.
For the first 60 or so tapes, I read back every one. There were no
uncorrectable read errors. I've given up checking every tape, and only
check samples now.
[not an official statement of HP, no warrantee express or implied, etc.]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Richard Seymour <seymour@milton.u.washington.edu>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
we've gone thru about 100 consumer-grade Sony P6-120MP tapes ($5.90 at our
local VideoOnly store) on a TTI exabyte system on a pair of VMS microVAXes.
the TTI system has a display showing retry counts and ECC recovery on
readback.
we usually see fewer than 0.10 percent in either read or write. occasionally
(1 tape per 40?) we'll have a downright BAD tape (error rate usually above
10.0
percent) The first records of many tapes often show errors on first
write-use,
but do not show them on readback. Our use involves write once, read-many and
appending-to-tail operations. the consumer grade tapes easily excel over the
9-track tapes i used to buy for our "real" tape drives.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: fed!m1rcd00@uunet.UU.NET (Bob Drzyzgula)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We use Sony tapes exclusively. I have heard varying reports of success
or lack of success with other brands, but have never heard of trouble
with Sony tapes. This is not too suprising, since Sony makes the drive
that Exabyte puts circuitry around. When we need a supply, we tell our
procurement people that we need 100 tapes or whatever, say they *have*
to be Sony, and let them bargin. They tend to check around with local
video and audio tape suppliers, and can usually get a pretty good price
on such a large batch. Last time they came from a local store called
Saxitone.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: tankus@hsi.com (Ed Tankus)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...have been using Sony 8mm p6-120mp tapes with great success. I pay $8.63
from Computerware Data Products in Eden Prairie, MN ... in LARGE quantites
even
BIGGER discounts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------