Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 07:57:08 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: brian.scott@slipmat.net, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Autoloading Tape Drives Message-ID: <199907261457.HAA78007@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <37978542.1F4ADFC9@slipmat.net>
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>Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 15:55:30 -0500 >From: Brian Scott <brian.scott@slipmat.net> >Can anyone recommend any autoloading tape drives that they've had >success with? I have about 15 gigs that need backed up nightly. Since about 10 months ago, we've been using an ADIC FastStor DLT 4000 -- it's a (Quantum) DLT 4000 drive (20 GB native; 40 GB assuming 50% compression) in a cabinet that holds a 7-slot autoloader. It's been fairly good; the negative things that occur to me (in no particular order): * First unit received had a firmware bug/misfeature: if the unit lost power, it was necessary to manually press the "power" switch to turn it on. (That is, it didn't recall the state of the power switch across power cycles.) This came to light when we had a power outage several months ago, thanks to interesting human error in setting up the UPS. To ADIC's credit, they agreed that this was a bug, and RMAd the unit. However, the replacement that arrived ahd the same problem. :-( It would have been Real Nice if there had been some way to field-upgrade the firmware. (2nd unit was RMAd, as well; 3rd try worked better.) * That is, the 3rd one worked better until about a month ago: something happened over a weekend, and the drive refused to disgorge one of the cartridges. Camee in on a Saturday morning to try to make it eject; no go. Called support, went through the stuff I had already done; she finally instructed me (over the phone) on how to disassemble the unit enough to manually eject the cartridge. That process seems to have worked, without apparent damage to the cartdridges. (At her suggestion, I checked each cartridge to ensure that its leader was intact. Each was.) However, again, the whole unit needed to be RMAd -- couldn't just swap the drive. * The drive -- and this is probably a Quantum issue -- doesn't seem to have a way to mechanically force it to "don't ever try to do your own compression" mode. There may well be a SCSI command to do this, but I've had higher-priority issues to deal with, so this one's priority has suffered. Vaguely related to this: when a cartridge is loaded, the drive needs to scan a chunk of tape to "calibrate" the drive (so that if the tape is written comressed, it says that way, I suppose). This takes a while. * The firmware (and the raised numerals on the sides of the slots) refer to the slots as "1 -7". This is counter-intuitive to me; I'd expect (and prefer) to work with the range 0-6. FWIW, I'm using amanda as the software to control the thing. At the time we were deploying it, I wasn't aware of an amanda "changer script" that would drive it, so I cobbled one up (that uses Jason Thorpe's "chio" driver). Since then, a "real" changer script has been distributed with amanda, so no one else needs to be at the mercy of what I cobbled up. Hope this is useful, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (888) 347-0197 FAX: (650) 372-5915 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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