Tape back on SCO - suggestions??

[Karl Denninger]

In article <24A22AC7.14780 at ateng.com> chip at ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>According to bruce at mdi386.UUCP (Bruce A. McIntyre):
>>The best bargin for the money seems to be the ARCHIVE FASTPE for 60MB of
>>storage for about $600, either Internal or External.
>
>Our experience has been nothing but trouble when an Archive tape is used in
>a fast I/O bus.  Tecmar tapes, on the other hand, work like a champ.
>
>Note that fast CPU's don't necessarily have fast I/O buses.  Check your
>hardware documentation.  Any faster than 6MHz -- maybe 8MHz, maybe -- and
>I would avoid Archive.

I disagree here.

We use Archive Viper drives on systems with bus speeds up to 16 Mhz.  They
seem to work fine; I haven't had any problems with them.

Then again, the systems we sell have each bus (8, 16, 32 bit) settable
individually.  This helps out a great deal, and avoids the problem entirely
-- you simply set the 8-bit bus to whatever the system's boards can handle.
Normally we run the 8-bit bus at 1 wait state; Archive viper's work great
set up like this.

We also get nearly 5MB/minute speed out of them when using decent software
(afio with double-buffering enabled, for example).

The OLDER archive boards (full-length) don't like high bus speeds.  The
newer ones (half-card) haven't had any problems here.

--
Karl Denninger (karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM, <well-connected>!ddsw1!karl)
Public Access Data Line: [+1 312 566-8911], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910]
Macro Computer Solutions, Inc.		"Quality Solutions at a Fair Price"