jeremy@misadel.oz (Jeremy Begg) (03/23/90)
I have just been reading the March 16 edition of "Computerworld Australia" which discusses the Exabyte drive and DEC's opinion and reaction. The article says: "DEC claims the Exabyte system is not safe enough for DEC to endorse or include with DEC systems. According to DEC's marketing manager for storage, Tom Gayford, DEC tested the Exabyte system in the US and found it to be unreliable on the smaller VMS machines...the Exabyte system system was reliable only on Unix machines." This seems a rather strange state of affairs; do they mean it worked on the larger VMS machines, or more likely, tested the Exabyte only as a means of providing a backup device for their workstations? I was aware that people were having trouble getting their Exabytes to work on their VAXstation 3100s, but I believe that these problems are fixed in the latest Exabyte and are further reduced by VMS 5.3 which provides a better SCSI driver. Does anyone from DEC, or anyone else in the know, have anything to say on, or expand upon, Mr Gayford's comments? Having bought a VS3100 myself I am currently thinking about backup options. The thought of spending each week loading 200 floppy disks does not really excite me :-( Jeremy Begg +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Management Information Systems, | E-Mail: jeremy@misadel.oz | | 125 Dew Street, Thebarton, | Phone: +61 8 3524877 (work) | | South Australia 5031 | | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
tihor@acf4.NYU.EDU (Stephen Tihor) (03/27/90)
There are some structural problems with the current generation of EXABYTEs in nonBACKUP situations. There have been extensive reports of problems with the small (slow) VAXstations that have not been reported with larger VAXstations. Many of these are addressed with the right dip switchs and the most recent ROMs. Since the support for such things vary with the repackager there are substancial variations. The general difficulties are sufficient that we have decided to wait for DAT from DEC.