stephen@hantsq.enet.dec.com (Stephen Wong) (07/20/90)
In article <1861@engage.enet.dec.com> I wrote: >I am considering to buy a tape drive for my PC. The budget should be within >US$400. The tape should be usable both in MS-DOS and SCO Unix environment. I >found Colorado tape drive to be my choice. But there is one drawback, it will >occupy a floppy connector, ie. I cannot have 5.25", 3.5" and tape drive at >once. However, there is an additional card to allow user to connect two >floppy drives and tape. > >Does anyone have experience with Colorado tape drive? Up till now, I have received 16 replies answering my question, I would like to express my thanks to the following people :- mehtash@clutx.clarkson.edu "Amanda Sutton" poffen@sj.ate.slb.com malloy@nprdc.navy.mil "Sean Malloy" pjd@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu "Peter J. Dotzauer" segpc!seg@vicom.com beareq!fx4!thieb@ai.mit.edu "Thieb" boulder!iscden!jbev@boulder.Colorado.EDU cgordon@vpnet.chi.il.us "Gordon Hlavenka" carlg@rosevax.rosemount.com "Carl Gansen" jpd@pc.usl.edu "Dugal James P." The following is summary of replies :- Colorado Mountain System (CMS) Tape Drive ========================================= It is a tape drive for connection with a floppy controller, from replies, it is almost the cheapest (US$240 - US$270) floppy tape drive. CMS tape is good for MS-DOS system, a software which can compress data, backup multiple partitions, span a disk partition across several tapes, is provided. However, this tape drive is very sensitive to CPU timing, raw tapes require formatting (something 1 hour for a 40 megabytes tape) and most importantly very slow. If you connect the tape drive to the second floopy connector, you should set up the CMOS (for PC/AT only) indicating no floopy drive on the second connector. You may also purchasing a seperate card for CMS tape drive which has the price in the range (US$85 - US$100). If the firmware of the tape drive is rev. 40 of later, you may purchase a special cable called CK-17, which can daisy chain two floppy drives and a tape drive. For SCO Unix, CMS tape drive uses QIC-40 standard, which is supported by SCO Unix and ODT, however the performance is very poor. Users should use the tape in single user mode in order to minimize the timing problem and overhead of the OS, therefore, in Unix, if there is a 120MB partition, the system should be shut down for 6 hours (including formatting of 3 tape and backup time)!! I think it is quite unacceptable for a normal system. Other Brand =========== There are several other brands of tape drive in the price range of US$300 - US$400, the following 2 brands are discussed in replies Wangtek 5099EK It is a 60MB tape drive. It uses DC-600 tape and the capacity is 60MB. It comes with a controller card and a software for backup in MS-DOS. The maximum transfer speed is 5Mbit/min. Wangtek is supported in SCO Unix and the driver is quite good. There is a 150MB model called 5150PK. I have decided to order a Wangtek tape drive instead of a CMS one. Archive FT-60 It is a 60MB tape drive also, the specification is similar to Wangtek, but the price is higher. Archive is also supported in SCO Unix.