need info on 6386

[Walter Reed]

I am looking into the AT&T 6386 pc for use as a BBS.  My configuration
would be 4 meg ram, 8 port card, tape backup, UNIX V.3, either ESDI
controller or the ST-506 one.  My question is how reliable are these
systems?  We can't have the BBS crashing every 2 days...
Is the increased expense of the ESDI systems worth it?  What kinds
of performance increase is there with the ESDI route?
     
Another big question is how do we get big hard drives on this system?
The WD controller can only handle 1024 tracks and the ESDI controller
only seems to handle 2 drives from what I've heard.
     
Yet Another Quizical Question is Is there a way to step the head to the
next track on the tape drive that goes with this machine?  Why I ask is
that I would like to write a program that would be able to get a file
from any part of the tape quickly (the tapes directory would be on disk.)
I would like to do this without sequentially going through all the tracks.
     
Thanks for any help you can provide...
     
Walter Reed
     
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