car@trux.UUCP (Chris Rende) (01/08/91)
We are considering the purchase of an 8mm tape drive for backup purposes. I would appreciate any info/experience that anyone can offer. Price, speed, service, interfacing, unix-able-ness, storage, etc... I have a Nixdorf Targon M35/50 (Pyramid 9810). The plan would be to connect the new 8mm tape drive to the system as drive 1. (Drive 0 is the 9track tape drive that came with the system). Thanks, car. -- Christopher A. Rende Central Cartage (Nixdorf/Pyramid/SysVR2/BSD4.3) uunet!edsews!rphroy!trux!car Multics,DTSS,Unix,Shortwave,Scanners,UnixPC/3B1 trux!car@uunet.uu.net Minix 1.2,PC/XT,Mac+,TRS-80 Model I,1802 ELF trux!ramecs!car "I don't ever remember forgetting anything." - Chris Rende
G.Eustace@massey.ac.nz (Glen Eustace) (01/09/91)
We currently have a Exabytes drive connected to our existing controller on our Pyramid 9815. We are running OSx5.0 and in the most part the drive works well. Be aware that we have experienced numerous IOP or is that TPE crashes resulting from what is reported as a gwatcher() timeout. The cause seems to be that the microcode assumes that certain io operations e.g. forward spacing, will take x secs to complete, when they don't you get this error. The Exabyte transport speed is such that if you are trying to skip a big file the probability of this occurring increases dramatically. In one of our scripts we have an mt fsf 1 in a executed n times rather than mt fsf n to try to prevent this controller crash. This problem has been reported to Pyramid but todate we haven't had a microcode version that is fixed. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Glen Eustace, Software Manager, Computer Centre, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. EMail: G.Eustace@massey.ac.nz Phone: +64 63 69099 x7440, Fax: +64 63 505 607, Timezone: GMT-12
russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) (01/10/91)
We have two exabyte drives on our SGI 4D/240s and are very happy with them. We use them for all our backup (~5GB of disk). There was a bug in the drivers under a previous release of Irix (3.2) which caused the drives to rewind when some IOCTLs were issued. The impact of this was that you could not put more that one file onto a tape with bru or tar. The bug is now fixed. -- Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand. <rj_fulton@aukuni.ac.nz>