shz@zarquon.pgd.hawaii.edu (Stan H. Zisk) (05/10/91)
Douglas Harvey of Ronald J. Krumm writes: >1) We have been having a lot of I/O errors with our 8mm tape systems. > Up until recently we had been using Sony P6-120MP Video 8 tapes, > at around $7 each. Now we are using Maxell HS-8/112 data tapes, > at around $13 each or so. The I/O errors don't occur nearly so > often, but they still do occur -- is this to be expected? I assume these are recoverable errors showing up during "dump"'s - I have about 3 dozen Exa tapes, all either Sony or Fuji P6-120 metal, $7 to $9 each, dating back 18 months or so. Most are tar archives rather than file-system dumps. I can't remember seeing even ONE error during the writing of all of them (but there may be an auto-rewrite-errors in the "tar" program) - and any restoring I've done (admittedly no more than a file a month or so) from even the oldest tapes has gone without a hitch. We have only 7 or 8 Exabyte 8200 drives here on an equal number of machines (Sparc-1[+]'s and one 4/260), using the standard OS 4.1 /dev/[n]rst# drivers (with the one bug-fix to take care of the rewind problem on the Sparc's). I haven't monitored all the users carefully, but have heard no problems with writing or reading to the Exabytes in over a year of archiving use by 10 - 15 people on all the machines. Stan Zisk University of Hawaii Planetary Geosciences Division.