[rescue] Exabyte 8500S - oui ou non?

[N. Miller]

--On Wednesday, November 12, 2003 4:23 PM -0500 "Sheldon T. Hall" 
<shel at cmhcsys.com> wrote:

> OK, you sold me.  I just bought a new DLT drive off eBAY
> (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3057362707) ...
> Serendipitously, the case matches the Compaq case my CD burner is in.

Good call.

Be aware that DLT (and other streaming tapes) need to get a solid
stream of data to perform well and not wear out the tapes and heads.
Running backups at night is a good way to help this process; not sure
if any of the Open Source backups systems will allow you to stream
multiple streams to them or not, but it would be something to look
into.  Staging (as you indicated you were doing) to local disks if
the local disks and bus are fast (i.e. SCSI) will probably also help.

My understanding is, if there's not enough data being streamed to the
tape drive, the heads basically "see-saw" the tape back and forth to
write each of the bands of data.

The only thing I've ever seen a problem with on DLT tapes is the
"hook" on the end of the tape media itself.

=Nadine=