Exabyte 2.2 Gb Streamer for ISC

[0000-Admin0000]

In article <3417 at rsiatl.UUCP> pda at rsiatl.UUCP (Paul D. Anderson) writes:
>I have been looking into getting an Exabyte 2.2 Gig streamer for
>my system and one other.  (Disk drives are getting cheap and
>it's getting tough to back them up on 60Mb DC600A cartridges!)
>
>I'm running ISC 2.2 on a 16 bit bus with 20 Mhz/386/8 Mb main
>memory.  Disk controller is Adaptec 1542 talking to a Newbury
>4380S (300 meg scsi) and a Maxtor 8760S (650 meg scsi).  That's
>basic hardware config.
>
>Has anyone been using an Exabyte (or related drive)?  How fast is
>it?  Does it require special utilities or will tar or cpio
>drive it with No Problem through a specific device (and what device
>is that?)  HELP!

The Exabyte SCSI tape device does work with ISC 2.2--thru the normal
tape device file: /dev/tape  with a major number of 41, minor 8--
but it's very very picky as to block size.  For writes we
can't get good consistent results using pax or tar or cpio directly,
we have to use find ... -cpio, next best is cpio with a 1k block size,
and for reads nothing works consistently except cpio with a big
buffer, say 256k.  Otherwise we get all kinds of error messages,
including tape not loaded, end tape press any key, error on read...

A better option if u want to spring for the extra $$ is the Chantal
drivers which not only work any which way you want to write to the
Exabyte, but come with nice utilities for displaying addresses
and ROM versions of installed devices as well as retension, rewind,
reset, erase...These drivers work with the fast file system, but
replace the HPDD--they are a little faster, and support worm. opto-
magnetic and other drives.


-- 
 Ed Whittemore 		uunet!maxed!ed    ed at maxed.amg.com
 American Micro Group, Inc. 		201 944 3293