achille@cernvax.UUCP (achille) (03/22/89)
Hi there, I'm looking for information about performance of the Workstation Solution's Exabyte product and associated software. We've got both the h/w and the s/w and we're getting lot of troubles: Using either wbak or rwm, everything starts up OK, then from time to time we get 'write IO error' with two different behaviour: wbak: after the error we get a message coming very likely from the WS's tfp library (internal error # something), then some times it goes on very slowly (much slower than the usual 40-50KB/sec) and some times just aborts after a couple of minutes. rwmt: the write IO error repeats continuously, despite the fact that the error message claims that the program is aborting. The exatape_slog says that there is a medium error but: 1) we bought 5 units: the tests are done by 5 different group of people on 5 different units and we all 5 get the same problem. 2) I've personally tried 3 different kind of cassettes: a) Sony P6-15, b) Sony P5-90 (this is apparently only for Europe, it looks like 90 minutes in Europe are roughly equivalent to some 100-110 minutes in the States, PAL/SECAM TV standards have more lines than NTSC, this probably is the only difference between p5/p6). c) Exabyte 2048 certified tapes. and always got the same errors, in different places on the tape every time I was running a test. Now I've tried the same cassettes on an exabyte unit on a Sun and wrote the same cassettes some 20 times each and never got a problem, nor reading nor writing. Another funny thing is that I can read on Apollo's exabyte tapes written on Sun but not viceversa, tapes written on Apollo always give a 'I/O error' on Sun. I've also read tapes written on a uVax on both Sun and Apollo succesfully; I could not try reading Apollo written tapes on uVax as their controller is broken just now. Now these write errors are very frequent, one every 2 tapes written, so we are unable to use the exabytes for the purpose of running unattended backups ! I've been in contact via faxes with WS but up to now they've been not very helpful. Please, help, I'll summarize to the net, together with some performance figures I'm collecting on both Sun and Apollo. Thanx in advance. Achille Petrilli Cray and Personal Workstation Operations
patrick@nswitgould.OZ (Patrick Herlihy) (04/03/89)
in article <960@cernvax.UUCP>, achille@cernvax.UUCP (achille) says: > > > Using either wbak or rwm, everything starts up OK, then > from time to time we get 'write IO error' with two different behaviour: > wbak: after the error we get a message coming very likely from the WS's > tfp library (internal error # something), then some times it goes on very > slowly (much slower than the usual 40-50KB/sec) and some times just aborts > after a couple of minutes. Interesting... we just bought the same unit & are having exactly the same problem. I put it down to buying an inferior tape (I went out and bought a normal 8mm video tape while we are waiting for our tapes from Apollo to arrive). I am suspicious of the unit itself, because we get the same "write error" when I tried the small tape supplied with the unit. Anyone else had problems? Patrick Herlihy School of Electrical Engineering University of Technology, Sydney