Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 02:05:05 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: chad@dcfinc.com Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SCSI tape drives Message-ID: <199809100805.CAA01759@harmony.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 09 Sep 1998 23:30:34 PDT." <199809100630.XAA08373@freebie.dcfinc.com> References: <199809100630.XAA08373@freebie.dcfinc.com>
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In message <199809100630.XAA08373@freebie.dcfinc.com> "Chad R. Larson" writes: : Does anyone here have any experience with SCSI Travan drives under : FreeBSD? If so, how are they working out? I have been using the ATAPI versions of the travan drive on my -current box for several months now. I've been doing daily backups on them for the past couple of weeks. The drive is good for about 400kB/s or so (although this will vary from about 350kB/s to 450kB/s depending on the drive I use). I've had problems with Sony media last year, but the stuff I bought recently works. The PPro that I have has the 440FX chipset, so its IDE isn't quite up to snuff and I needed to put an ISA ide controller into the box to get it working (although I could have purchased a PCI IDE controller). Before I did this, Soeren and I were tearing our hair out over what to do. Overall, I'd say that Travan is low end. I got it because it was cheaper to get two IDE tape drives (I think I paid $185 each[*]) and give one to the FreeBSD project than it was to buy one SCSI tape drive (at the time $450 was the lowest I could find, although I kinda wish I'd gone for the $550 4mm with 4 tape magazine). I'd rate Travan in general as OK for light use, on a personal system, but I wouldn't put it into a "enterprise" setting. I think I may be pushing the limits with might nightly dumps, but so far so good. I change tapes when I feel like it. I do a level 0 every so often. I don't know how the Travan on SCSI would work for you, but I suspect that you'd have fewer oddball IDE related problems if you went that route, and parted with an extra $100. Warner [*] Not counting the pair I picked up at a garage sale for $1.00. One was missing its tape head, and the other one seems to work wonderfully. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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