David.Maynard@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu (David Maynard) (06/08/89)
Does anyone know what drive and controller are used in the new 150 Mbyte 1/4" tape drive option? Does the new option still use the Emulex MT-02 controller? I asked our local Sun office, but they haven't had a chance to investigate the new drives yet. Also, are tapes written in QIC-24 format on the new drives transferrable to the 60Mbyte drives? (I ask because, when Sun switched from 4-track to 9-track drives there was a slight compatibility problem. Since the 9-track drives wrote a narrower track that some 4-track drives could not reliably read.) Thanks, David David P. Maynard (dpm@cs.cmu.edu) Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Any opinions expressed are mine only. I haven't asked the ECE department or CMU what they think.
dan@wind.bellcore.com (Daniel Strick) (06/09/89)
I have heard a "rumor" to the effect that these are Archive Viper 2150S cartridge drives. I assume there is more than one source of similar drives (QIC-150 format) and I doubt that SMI would base a product on a drive with only one source. I have used the Viper 2150S with SMI, Emulex, and Interphase SCSI. A sun-3/60 seemed to accept the drive when the system was up and running unix, but it refused to boot off the drive (the error messages suggested confusion over low level SCSI protocols). Rumor has it that SMI buys the drive with special firmware. A sun-4/60 seemed to like the drive just fine, though I could not completely test booting because I didn't have a boot tape. The Emulex host adapter (model VH01) seemed to think that the Viper failed to respond correctly to the synchronous transfer parameter negotiation messages (though this did not interfere with the use of the drive). The Interphase adapter (model 4210) accepted the drive without comment. (P.S. The 3/60 ran 4.0.1 and the 4/60 ran 4.0.3c. The Emulex and Interphase adapters were used in a sun-4/260 running release 3.x with a home grown driver for the scsi cards.) Performance was good (~100 kb/sec max) with the sun-4/60, Emulex, or Interphase host adapters. The drive may require a few extra seconds at the beginning of the tape to determine the tape type or the format in which it is written or to align the heads with the tape. The drive is capable of reading and writing in either QIC-120 or QIC-150 format. It can read QIC-24 format and some versions of the drive are said to read QIC-11 format. The release 4.0.1 SMI scsi driver only seems willing to write in QIC-150 format. The 4.0.3 driver seems willing to write in either QIC-150 or QIC-120. I rather liked the drive even though 1/4" tape (the QIC formats) is not very satisfying (old, slow, low capacity). Dan Strick dan@bellcore.com bellcore!dan
weber@decvax.UUCP (Jeff Weber) (06/20/89)
In article <3747@kalliope.rice.edu> David.Maynard@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu (David Maynard) writes: >X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 21, message 4 of 5 > >Does anyone know what drive and controller are used in the new 150 Mbyte >1/4" tape drive option? Does the new option still use the Emulex MT-02 ....stuff deleted New 150MB tape drive is an Archive Viper. It is "embedded SCSI" which means that the SCSI connects directly to the drive and it doesn't use a separate controller (ala MT-02). It is about 30% faster in SCSI bus transfer rates and will actually stream with the faster 327MB disks (but doesn't w/SMD for some reason). The Viper will READ QIC-11,24,120&150. It will WRITE QIC-120 and 150 depending on the media that you put in it. The old media for the 60MB drive will not work. You can read in all of your old tapes but cannot write a tape that your old 60M'er can read. It seems that software 4.0.1 and later supports this thing. Jeff Weber