Want 8mm tape drive experience

[Glen Eustace]

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 at massey.ac.nz
Phone: +64 63 69099 x7440, Fax: +64 63 505 607,    Timezone: GMT-12