What tape drive should I buy?

Robert Hoquim robert at towers.UUCP
Sun Jul 22 03:12:55 AEST 1990


gary at mic.UUCP (Gary Lewin) writes:

>In article <1990Jul17.221141.5971 at esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> johnl at esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:

>>I would like to buy a 1/4" tape drive that reads and writes 120 or 150 MB
>>tapes and really works on my Intel 302 running ISC Unix.

>I have had very good experience with the Wangtek 150 meg tape units.  If
>possible, go with the SCSI version.  Both versions will work equally well
>with 150 or the newer 250 (Scotch No. DC 6250) meg tapes.

	I have a SCSI Archive 2150 that also works quite well with ISC, I
can use DC600 tapes for 125 meg or DC6150 (DC600xtd) tapes for 150 meg.  Now
are you saying that with the SCSI drivers that we use for ISC the new 6250
tapes will give us 250 megs with no other changes?  If I had any complaint
it would be the inability of any SCSI tape drive to do multiple tape
backups.  (ie.  file systems larger than 150 megs in a single CPIO pass
without breaking things down into subdirectories on that file system.)

So I should ask this question:

	Has anyone figured a way with a SCSI tape drive (Archive or Wangtek)
to do multiple tape backups with CPIO?  Say a file system that is 300 megs
that would take 2 tapes with cpio asking for another tape like it did with
the older Non-SCSI Wangtek tape drives (60 megs).  There just doesn't seem
to be any report from the driver to CPIO that the end of the medium has been
reached and just hangs.

Thanks for any light you folks can shed on these questions.

-- 
  Robert Hoquim                                 Small Systems Specialists
  (317)-255-6807                                8500 N. Meridian
..!nstar!towers!robert                          Indianapolis, IN.  46260



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