First impressions: 3B2 120MB SCSI tape drive

[Stephen J. Friedl]

Hiho net.folks,

     These are some first impressions of the 120MB SCSI cartridge
tape drive available for the 3B2.  A customer with 240MB of
internal drives was losing his mind backing up a very large
database, and it took five or six tapes plus hours and hours.  He
ordered a 120MB tape drive, and we installed it on Friday.

     We installed the SCSI host adaptor, software, and tape
drive, and we were able to offload 110MB of data onto one tape in
about *half an hour*.  After we did this, my customer was walking
around his office, clutching the tape, saying to himself "I'm
having orgasms" :-).  He'll now put the backup in the background
to run at two in the morning and he won't have to shut down the
machine every day for this.

     Installation was plug-n-play with very good instructions.
The drive uses DC600A tapes but cannot read a 23MB cartridge.
These tapes do not require formatting, they don't retension upon
insertion (*yea*), and they don't wheeze like the 23MB units do.
These drives use the standard cpio command instead of
/etc/ctccpio, and doing a backup no longer trashes the machine's
performance.

     We certainly don't know the long-term considerations of tape
data reliability, but it would take some pretty big problems to
shine a bad light on this drive.  Hot damn, this is nice equipment.

     I can provide ordering info to anybody who wants it.  You
could help *me* out by sending a note to droman at vsi.com (boss)
urging him to get one of these for us :-).

     Steve

-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc.  +1 714 545 6442    3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl
----Nancy Reagan on 120MB SCSI cartridge tape: "Just say *now*"----