zepf@trout.nosc.mil (Tom Zepf) (06/13/90)
In article <8720@brazos.Rice.edu> you write: >X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 207, message 12 > >I am preparing to purchase a Exabyte subsystem from Andataco, and wondered >if any of you sun.experts had any experience with Exabyte drives from >these folks. I am planning to put it on a SS1 with 16 MB memory running >SunOS4.1. I would be grateful for any insight you can provide on this >combination. We have purchased two Exabyte drives from Andataco over the last year and a half. I have one connected to a 3/60 and the other connected to a 3/260. I am currently running SunOS 4.1, but have used the drives with SunOS 4.0.1. The original drive we bought worked fine for about a year, but pretty much doesn't work at all now. We get write retry errors if we write big files. Cleaning the tape drive does not seem to help. Both drives have a hard time living on the SCSI bus with other peripherals. They seem to hang sometimes, forcing a reboot. Overall, I would still recommend Exabytes: their price/performance can't be beat. I just have two so I can hope that at least one is working at all times. Maybe someday I'll move to DAT if I hear it is more reliable. What I would really like is a MagnetoOptical drive, but that costs too much! Backups here would be impossible, or nearly so, without the Exabytes. It's definitely a love/hate relationship. Please note that this is not a complaint against Andataco. They have been extremely helpful (being a block away can't hurt I suppose...). None of their hardware has failed, it is the Exabyte drive itself which is somewhat unreliable. We have purchased quite a bit of equipment from them and have been satisfied. In fact, I like their enclosures more than any we have used yet. And they are very price competitive. We have several Sparcstation SLCs on order, and I intend to hook one of the Exabytes up to one of these, but I have not tried a Exabyte with a SS1 or SS1+ yet. I've heard rumors that the driver is not built into the sun4c kernel, but I can't verify this. I suppose I'll find out soon... Tom Zepf Optigraphics Corporation uunet!optigfx!zepf 9339 Carroll Park Drive scubed!optis31!zepf San Diego, CA 92121 (619)292-6060