glass@sequent.UUCP (David N. Glass) (11/13/90)
I have seen the conversation about adding 3rd party disks and it brings up a question. Is there any problem I should know about when trying to add a 3rd party scsi tape to the system? Will the existing controller handle them? Any help would be appreciated. -- Dave ------------------ David N. Glass Performance Computing Inc. software engineering consultants PO Box 230995 ...!sequent!glass Portland, OR 97223 (503) 624-8245
jpe@egr.duke.edu (John P. Eisenmenger) (11/14/90)
From article <46268@sequent.UUCP>, by glass@sequent.UUCP (David N. Glass): > I have seen the conversation about adding 3rd party disks and it > brings up a question. Is there any problem I should know about > when trying to add a 3rd party scsi tape to the system? Will > the existing controller handle them? Any help would be appreciated. WATCH OUT!! Make sure that any 3rd party tape you buy will work on an RS6000! As it turns out, IBM uses their own firmware in their 8mm drive so a "standard" 8mm drive will *not* work. Whether this will be fixed in later revisions of AIX (it supposedly worked in earlier revisions), I don't know. The moral of this story is that you can't expect your Sun's SCSI 8mm drive to work from an RS6000. [ BTW - this is not what IBM told me. This is from the vendor and may or may not be a correct analysis. All I care about is my refund... ] There are at least two vendors that ship RS6000 compatible drives: IBM and Dickens Data Systems. Contemporary Cybernetics Group started shipments of their RS6000 drive this week. At ~$3850 it will be the cheapest of the three, provided it works (I'm waiting for confirmation from a *user* before sending in a PO. > > -- Dave > > ------------------ > David N. Glass > Performance Computing Inc. software engineering consultants > PO Box 230995 ...!sequent!glass > Portland, OR 97223 (503) 624-8245 If someone out there has gotten a "regular" SCSI tape drive to work, please let the world know... -John Eisenmenger jpe@egr.duke.edu Duke University jpe@cs.duke.edu Dept. of Electrical Engineering Durham, NC 27706