Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:16:24 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Dan Janowski <danj@3skel.com>, Joerg Micheel <joerg@cs.waikato.ac.nz> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DDS-2/DDS-3 drives Message-ID: <19990410131624.H2142@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904092329100.27348-100000@fnur.3skel.com>; from Dan Janowski on Fri, Apr 09, 1999 at 11:40:23PM -0400 References: <19990408135519.B1051@lucy.cs.waikato.ac.nz> <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904092329100.27348-100000@fnur.3skel.com>
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On Friday, 9 April 1999 at 23:40:23 -0400, Dan Janowski wrote: > On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Joerg Micheel wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> [this might as well belong to -questions]: >> >> For some project people here are interested to own a DDS tape drive. I do have >> no experience with these drives and would be interested in any stories you >> may have to tell about how reliable they are, how well they work with >> FreeBSD (or other OS: Solaris, Linux), what tapes may cause trouble etc. >> You may respond privately, unless it is of general interest. > > Aaah, DAT. I've had some mixed experience. Right now I have a > Seagate da0: <SEAGATE ST39173W 4290>. It is a DDS-3 drive. > I had an HP, it went bad. I had an identical Seagate, it went bad. > The real problem seems to be the tape, not the drives. I can't agree here. I've almost never had trouble with the tapes, but once the drives went bad, they couldn't write any tape, old or new. > On good authority the recommendation is Maxell tape above all > others, Sony, HP, etc. To DDS-3 media the drive will sustain about > 1MB/sec native, with a 12GB native capacity. I've had, on very good authority (the tape expert at SNI), the recommendation Sony above all others, admittedly for Exabyte. Sony manufactures the Exabyte brand tapes. > The failures I had with previous drives seemed to be related to some > bad HP tapes. A bad tape can damage heads. The busted HP drive could > read tapes but not write them. That's not a typical failure mode. Typically the heads just wear. Sure, a bad tape can damage heads, but so can good ones. > FreeBSD deals very well with DAT, and when there are problems it tells > you. As with any tape drive, my recommendation is to buy it from a > company that will be there when it breaks. I don't know if that helps much. I've had *very* bad experience with repairs to helical scan tapes. I tend to buy from the cheapest place, because when they fail they're not worth repairing. Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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