[comp.sys.sun] using 60 Mbye tapes in 150 Mbyte drive

ballen@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Bruce Allen) (10/08/90)

I have a SparcStation with a 150Mbyte desktop tape drive unit.  This unit
is supposed to be used with DC6150 1/4 inch tape cartridges, of which I
have a reasonable supply.  I also have large numbers of DC600, DC300, and
DC450 tapes from my old Sun 3/60.  These tapes are fairly useless to me
now ... or so I thought.  

On a whim, I decided to try using one of the old (60 Mybte) tapes in the
new tape drive, which writes in a 150 Mbyte format.  It worked fine.  I
wrote 140 Mbytes of stuff to the tape, read it back onto disk and did a
diff -r to check that all the data had been correctly saved.  It was all
there, intact.

So to get to the point - how many of you are using old tapes with the new
drive?  Have you had good/bad experiences?  What is your advice?  Please,
no long winded replies along the lines of "your data is priceless, throw
out your old tapes and buy 50 more DC6150's, etc.  I won't use old tapes
for my system backups.
				Bruce Allen

prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson) (10/27/90)

In a recent article ballen@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Bruce Allen) writes:

>I have a SparcStation with a 150Mbyte desktop tape drive unit.  This unit
>is supposed to be used with DC6150 1/4 inch tape cartridges, of which I
>have a reasonable supply.  I also have large numbers of DC600, DC300, and
>DC450 tapes from my old Sun 3/60.  These tapes are fairly useless to me
>now ... or so I thought.  

I have had good experiences using old DC600A cartridges with a QIC-150
tape drive. However, I am not able to use any of the DC300A, DC300XL or
DC300XL/P tapes.

Robert Claeson                  |Reasonable mailers: rclaeson@erbe.se
ERBE DATA AB                    |      Dumb mailers: rclaeson%erbe.se@sunet.se

rossc@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Ross Cartlidge) (10/27/90)

I have a 207 Meg 3.5" Disk and would like to install it into the spare
internal slot on an SS1 ( I have one Sun installed disk already). Has
anyone had any experience in doing this - ie, getting the plastic mount,
power and SCSI cables etc.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Ross Rodney Cartlidge			    |   rossc@extro.ucc.su.oz.au
University Computing Service, H08	    |   Phone:     +61 2 6923497
University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia   |   FAX:       +61 2 6606557