chouinar@centrcn.umontreal.ca (Luc Chouinard) (11/09/90)
I have been looking into this, since I learned that , with a 16 cartrige stacker, one DAT unit could give me a 32 Gbyte data storage for 6000 $ U.S. (about 2500 for the DAT plus 3500 for the stacker). We have software here that would give us unattended backups and restores for six months periods or more!!! The stacker is available now. It is a system that is driven from the rs-232 serial port with simple commands to select, eject or load cartriges. They fit on any DAT units. The DAT unit is not yet available for the SGI PI and servers because Distributors dont have the SCSI drivers specifications. AP UNIX computer services in San Diego (DAT distributor) have talked with SGI about getting those specs. They may get them in one or two months and then they will be able to sale a DAT unit with the SGI driver in next january or february... At the same time (next february) SGI should be announcing a DAT unit as a option product for their computers. I think its a shame that we should wait this long just because SGI wants to be in the race with other vendors. Even if they were a few months behind other vendors, I don't think that they would suffer much. (excuse my english) +---------------------------------------------------------+ | Luc Chouinard Services Informatiques | | Administrateur de systeme Universite de Montreal | +---------------------------------------------------------+ | email : chouinard@CENTRCN.UMontreal.CA | +---------------------------------------------------------+
meyer@ifi.unizh.ch (Urs Meyer) (11/14/90)
In article <9011082315.AA07404@centrs1.centrcn.umontreal.ca> chouinar@centrcn.umontreal.ca (Luc Chouinard) writes: [...] >The DAT unit is not yet available for the SGI >PI and servers because Distributors dont have the SCSI >drivers specifications. > >At the same time (next february) SGI should be announcing >a DAT unit as a option product for their computers. > >I think its a shame that we should wait this long just >because SGI wants to be in the race with other vendors. >Even if they were a few months behind other vendors, I >don't think that they would suffer much. > >| Luc Chouinard Services Informatiques | >| Administrateur de systeme Universite de Montreal | >+---------------------------------------------------------+ >| email : chouinard@CENTRCN.UMontreal.CA | SGI Zurich offers a WangDAT drive distributed by the German company Solid Computer. In my opinion it's a pure WangDAT drive. No modifications necessary. It's supposed to run with Irix 3.3 or higher. It also runs on a Macintosh with the Retrospect backup software. No extra drivers needed. There is a major problem, though. I was not able to write/read more than (say) 300-900 MB on a tape (number is different each time). It is not a faulty tape. We tried it with several brand new tapes. The drive stops with an I/O error after some hundreds of MBs. Sometimes I can read back the data up to that point, sometimes not. I think there are a lot of retries when reading back data. The data transfer rate for reading is about 30 kB/sec (!) while it is 90-150 kB/s for writing, depending on how fast you can supply the data. (btw, I used tar and bru with dd or bstreams). Any expert out there who could give me some insight? Urs Meyer ---------- meyer@ifi.unizh.ch, {uunet,...}!mcsun!cernvax!unizh!meyer University of Zurich, Dept of Computer Science, Multimedia Lab, CH-8057 Zurich