fyl@ssc.UUCP (Phil Hughes) (08/27/87)
We are shopping for a 9-track tape drive to use for software
distribution. Seems like the least expensive approach for us would
be to add it to our AT running XENIX.
Anyone out there have any experiences with such a device? Good,
bad or indifferent. If you mail to me, I will summarize and post
the summary.
--
Phil Hughes, SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549,
Seattle, WA 98155 (206)FOR-UNIX
...!uw-beaver!tikal!ssc!fyl fyl@ssc.UUCP (Phil Hughes) (10/08/87)
Back in August I asked about other's experiences with 9-track tape
on XENIX systems. Here is what I discovered:
Overland Data makes a controller board that works with XENIX of about
any flavor. It is about $700. It will talk to any tape drive with
the Pertec interface.
Qualstar sells the least expensive 1600fpi tape drive. It is a streamer
that runs at 50ips (25ips at 3200fpi). Price is about $3000. It has a
1 year warranty with a 1 year extension available for $200 more.
Used drives exist but may be hard to find.
We decided to go with the Overland/Qualstar combination. Both Overland and
Qualstar sell the combination. It cost a few bucks less from Overland and
the idea of buying it from the people who wrote the drivers appealed to me.
When the package was delivered, I plugged it into a clone that we use to
copy disks and test things. It worked fine. Good diagnostics and good
documentation. Next, I installed it in our real system, an IBM AT.
No-go. Overland technical support was very nice to deal with, tried
everything they could think of and finally send another board with no
questions asked. The new board worked fine.
We have had it for about a month and I am very happy with it. We use
it to do daily backups (at 3200 fpi) and also to write distribution tapes
for the software we sell. It works with tar, cpio, dump, dd, you name it.
The only limitation I have first hand knowledge of is that they only support
a single tape drive. A problem is you dupe tapes and don't have a lot of
free disk space. One other problem mentioned is that they can't handle
reading tapes that have info written after the EOT marker. If you see
this as a problem, I suggest you talk to them.
My intention was not to plug one product but that is really all the information
I got from others, I bought it and it works.
--
Phil Hughes, SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549,
Seattle, WA 98155 (206)FOR-UNIX
...!uw-beaver!tikal!ssc!fyl