Date: Tue, 07 Oct 1997 20:18:58 -0500 From: dkelly@HiWAAY.net To: Eddie Fry <eddie@wicked.eaznet.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: IOMega Ditto tape drive Message-ID: <199710080119.UAA05414@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from Eddie Fry <eddie@wicked.eaznet.com> of "Tue, 07 Oct 1997 15:37:47 PDT." <199710072237.PAA00441@wicked.eaznet.com>
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eddie@wicked.eaznet.com said: > I want to put a tape drive in my FreeBSD box. I was thinking of the > internal ditto easy drive. I found the FAQ on QIC 40/80 drives. > Since the ditto easy drive is a floppy bus drive, will FreeBSD support > it??? I recently "helped" a friend put a Ditto 2G on his 5x86/133 system. Not something I'd advise anyone to do. The drive was cheap, about $125 including one tape. Store wanted $40 a tape. You know, 10 tapes and a Ditto drive puts you comfortably in the range of a real DAT drive and 10 tapes. Documentation was sparse. IOmega wanted $14 to talk on the phone. Naturally, the thing didn't work right out of the box. I found the IOmega www page to be helpful and found a hint that the floppy controller had to be capable of 1M Hz where 500 kHz was a normal floppy data rate. Apparently their software was not capable of telling you it wasn't able to communicate at that rate to the drive. Dug around here looking for FDC's. Found an Adaptec 1542CF that worked with the drive. What a waste of a perfectly good SCSI card. Told him I want my SCSI card back when he buys a genuine IOmega FDC card for his tape drive. To add insult to injury, the 2G Ditto can't format tapes. A 2G Sony preformatted tape isn't working as well as the genuine Ditto. Save your money until you have enough for a real tape drive. Its a darn good investment that will outlast your CPU. Often http://www.corpsys.com has good prices on DAT tape drives, but you have to watch out. There is a flood of Archive DAT changers on the market for $250 to $500. That could be a good deal for you as it will put an honest 2G to 4G on a $7 to $16 tape, double that storage with built-in compression. I purchased an Archive/Conner/Seagate 4326 (refurbished) for under $300. Has about the same guts as the above changer but was only a half height single-tape form factor. I see Bason has new ones for $459 at http://www.basoncomputer.com/td/td.htm. We won't consider the Archive external 4350XT at an unclaimed baggage store for $50. Only does 10MB/minute while the others do 24MB/minute, but it works perfectly. I've been playing with FreeBSD's tcopy command and my two tape drives. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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