wyatt@cfa.harvard.EDU (Bill Wyatt) (04/27/88)
In article <2018@homxc.UUCP>, dwc@homxc.UUCP (Malaclypse the Elder) writes: > > we have received one of those amazing exabyte 2.3Gbyte > tape drives and have it hooked up to one of our suns on > scsi. however, we don't seem to be able to do "no rewind > on close" with the drive (either the driver or the drive > doesn't support it). I don't know specifically about this setup, but I believe Exabyte has a known bug where a command to backspace-record over a filemark will cause an error, although the hardware manual for it specifically says this op is OK. The Ultrix driver I'm using (and presumably yours) will, upon closing after writes, write two tape marks and backspace over one of them, thus causing the error. The drive will rewind in this case. However, the tape drive, after this error-induced rewind, should reposition itself correctly. If this isn't happening something else is wierd. The performance hit of this is clearly unacceptable, so we are working with our controller manufacturer to overcome this bug in microcode on the controller, and are expecting new PROMS any moment. I believe Exabyte knows about this problem and should be fixing it themselves as well. -- Bill UUCP: {husc6,ihnp4,cmcl2,mit-eddie}!harvard!cfa!wyatt Wyatt ARPA: wyatt@cfa.harvard.edu (or) wyatt%cfa@harvard.harvard.edu BITNET: wyatt@cfa2 SPAN: cfairt::wyatt