Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 08:28:14 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: spork@super-g.com Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DLT or AIT? Message-ID: <199811041628.IAA17856@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.00.9811032317390.12762-100000@super-g.inch.com>
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>Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 23:27:46 -0500 (EST) >From: spork <spork@super-g.com> >We're looking to replace the DAT drive on our backup machine with either a >DLT or AIT. Does anyone have any experience with the AIT drives? Any >favorites when it comes to the DLTs? We recently (about 2 months ago) got an ADIC DLT 4000 7-slot autoloader. It has been working well, with the following caveats: * Hardware compression is on by default. To turn it off, I have been told that I need to manually press a button just before the first file of a tape is written. Naturally, I find this obnoxious. (I was informed just yesterday afternoon thaht there may be a way to do this via SCSI commands, so there's some hope that this isn't going to be quite so annoying.) (Reason I want compression off is that I'm using amanda, and I do compression on the client side, before the data traverse our network. And we have a couple of largish filesystems that are mostly gzipped tarballs....) * There was a firmware "gotcha" -- if the device had been powered on, but then power was removed, when power was restored, it stayed turned off. Oops. We ended up RMAing the unit to replace the firmware -- I refuse to rely on procedures that involve the use of Microsoft code for anything important. (ADIC paid for the drop-ship, so our downtime was rather minimal.) And that shouldn't bite anyone now. * From a software perspective, I'm accustomed to numbering things (such as slots on an autoloader) starting from 0; thus, we'd have slots 0 - 6 for this device. Well, the device itslef (both in the firmaware & the physical embossed slot designations) uses 1 - 7. Yes, tis is minor -- but I'm hoping to document things enough that someone would be able to deal with the device if I should go on vacation or something. Jason Thorpe's "chio" driver (& friends) work just fine with the device. It is claimed that the drive in the auto-loader is field-replaceable, so one could upgrade from a DLT 4000 to a DLT 7000. I have *not* tried this myself. Hope this is useful, david -- David Wolfskill UNIX System Administrator dhw@whistle.com voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 371-4621 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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