Exabyte 8-mm tapes - no probs...

[Stan H. Zisk]

Douglas Harvey of Ronald J. Krumm writes:

>1) We have been having a lot of I/O errors with our 8mm tape systems.
>   Up until recently we had been using Sony P6-120MP Video 8 tapes,
>   at around $7 each.  Now we are using Maxell HS-8/112 data tapes,
>   at around $13 each or so.  The I/O errors don't occur nearly so
>   often, but they still do occur -- is this to be expected?  

I assume these are recoverable errors showing up during "dump"'s - 

I have about 3 dozen Exa tapes, all either Sony or Fuji P6-120 metal, $7
to $9 each, dating back 18 months or so.  Most are tar archives rather
than file-system dumps.  I can't remember seeing even ONE error during the
writing of all of them (but there may be an auto-rewrite-errors in the
"tar" program) - and any restoring I've done (admittedly no more than a
file a month or so) from even the oldest tapes has gone without a hitch.

We have only 7 or 8 Exabyte 8200 drives here on an equal number of
machines (Sparc-1[+]'s and one 4/260), using the standard OS 4.1
/dev/[n]rst# drivers (with the one bug-fix to take care of the rewind
problem on the Sparc's).  I haven't monitored all the users carefully, but
have heard no problems with writing or reading to the Exabytes in over a
year of archiving use by 10 - 15 people on all the machines.

Stan Zisk
University of Hawaii Planetary Geosciences Division.