9 May
2007
9 May
'07
2:44 p.m.
On 9 May 2007 at 15:30, Jules Richardson wrote:
Any recollection as to what sort of bugs? I don't
need it to write any data,
but I would rather it faithfully reproduced the data on the tapes* (rather
than giving junk whilst appearing to work)
My recollection is that there were numerous firmware bugs. We'd
received the drive as a sample in order in hope that we'd endorse it
as a drive to work with our software. It didn't work as expected,
TTi fessed up to some firmware problems and we told them to get in
touch with us when they got things ironed out and sent the drive
back.
Which is better than the trick that Datasonix pulled with its Pereos
drive. They sent us a sample to evaluate. It took us about 2 hours
to determine that it wasn't ready for prime time and shipped it back
(although I probably still have the drivers for it). It was not only
slow and unreliable, but it was brain-dead, requiring a driver that
was something like 100K (MS-DOS) in size. Datasonix went ahead and
told a customer that we'd approved it--and the customer bought 150 of
the worthless things before they checked with us.
I've only ever seen it on QIC drives, to be
honest, not other tape transport
technologies. Is it definitely an age-related thing (i.e. it'll hit *all*
drives eventually, rather than being something related to the specific type of
rubber used on the QIC drives)?
Isn't most of the rubber used in QIC drives just neoprene? To me
that says anything using it will eventually have goo problems. How
about old printers with neoprene feed rollers?
Cheers,
Chuck