chuck@wooglin.scc.com (Charles Williams) (01/19/89)
I would like some information on 8mm tape drives. Please include manufacturer, price, storage capacity, and any pros or cons if you are using one. I will be more than happy to summarize the responses. Please send responses directly to me at chuck@wooglin.scc.com or cwilliams@bluto.scc.com Thank you in advance, Chuck Williams Contel Federal Systems
escott@uunet.uu.net (E. Scott Menter) (01/28/89)
Hi. There is already a wealth of information on 8mm drives in the Sun
Spots archives; I forget what it's listed under. I suspect that wnl will
put his two cents in right about here -> [[ Oh, alright. I think you are
talking about the file that contains information about the Exabyte tape
drive. That is stored under "sun-spots" as "Exabyte.replies". It is only
14337 bytes and it can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from the host
"titan.rice.edu" or via the archive server with the request
"send sun-spots Exabyte.replies". For more information about the archive
server, send a mail message containing the word "help" to the address
"archive-server@rice.edu". --wnl ]]
As for my experience, I bought 3 Delta Microsystems units from a company
called Peripheral Devices here in NYC. The Deltas were a bit more
expensive at $4500/unit than the others but came with some nice software
to do backups, get information about the drive, and do diagnostics.
However, the 2 of the units were DOA and the third rapidly fell way out
of spec with regard to errors. Delta was very helpful during this time
and shipped me new units, which seem to be a little flaky, but generally
okay. To be fair, I've seen no other disparaging references to Delta on
the net; only glowing reviews. Maybe I live in a high-radiation zone or
something.
The software was a little disappointing. The backup software is barely
beta test. The other stuff, and the device drivers, seem to perform
pretty well, however.
Don't buy the tapes from the vendors, by the way. They want about
$15/tape, and you can get them at your nearest video outlet for $8 or so.
You can contact Delta Micro at (415) 449-6881.
Other vendors include: Artecon (800) USA-ARTE
Perfect Byte (402) 554-1122
Unison (508) 898-0072
Box Hill (800) 727-3863
...and a cast of thousands
Hope this helps.
Scott Menter, Sr. Network Administrator, Shearson Lehman Hutton
DDN: escott@shearson.com UUCP: uunet!slcpi!escott
(212) 528-4858viktor@fine.princeton.edu (Viktor Dukhovni) (02/08/89)
(E. Scott Menter) writes: >Hi. There is already a wealth of information on 8mm drives in the Sun >Spots archives; I forget what it's listed under. I suspect that wnl will >put his two cents in right about here -> [[ Oh, alright. I think you are ... >drive. That is stored under "sun-spots" as "Exabyte.replies". It is only ... >"archive-server@rice.edu". --wnl ]] > Don't forget the great review by George Goble, occupying the whole of v7n46. >As for my experience, I bought 3 Delta Microsystems units from a company ... >However, the 2 of the units were DOA and the third rapidly fell way out >of spec with regard to errors. Delta was very helpful during this time >and shipped me new units, which seem to be a little flaky, but generally I also have heard only good things about Delta, however the Delta unit runs off the Sun internal SCSI host adaptor, I do not have any machines with SUN supplied SCSI drives. I chose to look for a product driven by the Ciprico 3500 SCSI host adapter, at around $1500 quite a steal. I found the Perfect source! Peter H. Berens, Apunix, apunix!phb@ucsd.edu, (619)484-0074 He ships a 3500 + Exabyte at just over $5000 for the whole package, including positively the best documentation I have ever seen for any software or hardware product. His own drivers for 3.X and 4.0 Sun3 and Sparc. (these do work! Testted on 3/180, 3/280 3.X and 4/280 4.0 ) There is an automatic installation script for the driver. Just run it, it will build a new kernel, save all changed files for deinstallation, and optionally even boot the new OS! How about that for ease of installation! >The software was a little disappointing. The backup software is barely >beta test. The other stuff, and the device drivers, seem to perform >pretty well, however. The Apunix network backup software works like a charm. All one has to do is follow the installation intructions and define REL4 in one file if needed. As shipped this will dump file systems from specified hosts onto the tape from cron every night, or can be scheduled manually if you prefer. I wanted to be able to leave a tape in the drive and append incrementals until I insert a new tape and restart with level 0. This made it desirable to keep a Table of contents in the first file on the tape. I got driver updates to allow me to do this within 2 days of the request. (These will I presume be in all future releases of the driver!). So now a have an Exabyte backing up my whole network on daily basis, without even having to change tapes more than once a week, and the software detects that I have changed tapes, does full backups of everything, and commences level 1 backups until the next tape change. Life could not be rosier. The Apunix driver supports BOTH fixed and variable width blocks, will read any tape in variable mode, so fixed is only useful if you distribute software on 8mm tapes. You can also enable P5 tape support in the driver if you need it. A tape status program is included! ( It reports on the ECC count tape left, tape type etc. )