24 Apr
2008
24 Apr
'08
2:34 p.m.
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:20:17 -0400
From: "Roy J. Tellason"
I saw some conversation going by in here recently
about Exabyte drives,
only the numbers don't sound anything like what I have, which is marked
"Model: HH CTS". There are all sorts of other numbers on there, for
various aspects of it.
Most Exabyte drives have model numbers of the form 8xxx, from 8000 to
8900, then the "Mammoth" models. The basic early 8200 will hold
about 2.1G on a standard 8mm tape. Later models require different
tapes to take advantage of larger capacities.
Quality of the drives are all over the place, from the built-like-a-
brick-outhouse 8200 and 8500 to the cheap-hunk-of-plastic 8700.
I'm told that these hold 20G on a tape. The guy I
got 'em from
unfortunately doesn't have any tapes to go along with them. One of those
tapes would back up pretty much of what I have on my LAN here, or whole
machines, as they sit. I'm guessing that the interface I'll be looking
at after I take it off of the current mounting plate will be SCSI-wide,
like the CD drives and some of the other stuff I have with it.
I suspect that that's 20G "compressed", which is the equivalent of
"Chinese electric motor horsepower", i.e. extremely optimistic.
Think I can get 'em going under linux? :-)
Sure--just be certain that the SCSI "flavor" matches what you've got
on your controller.
The general idea is that any SCSI tape drive that supports the
standard command set will work with Linux--and probably many other
platforms. It's been too long since I did "anybody's SCSI tape
backup" software, but the only gotchas are packages that use
nonstandard behavior such as read-after-write or strange varieities
of tapemarks. Heck, even the command set for auto-changers is
standard, being applicable to a little magazine that sits in your
tape drive to a bunch of robots crusing racks of 1/2" reel-to-reel
tapes. At least in theory, you can use anything from a 1/2" reel-to-
reel drive to a DLT without changing software.
Most SCSI tape drives feature read-after-write verification, which
puts them way above the garden variety consumer "floppy tapes", most
of which were garbage, IMOHO.
While not as good as DLT, 8mm is head-and-shoulders above 4mm DAT as
concerns reliability. The bottom of the barrel, IMOHO, was the
Datasonix Pereos 2.5mm format.
Cheers,
Chuck