[rescue] Exabyte 8500S - oui ou non?

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Saith 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.

I hope.  Semms that DLT III and III xl tapes are harder to find cheap than
IVs are.

> 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.

Not to mention they get real slow that way.

> 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.

I expect to be doing it all in the dead of night, on the SPARCstation
Classic, which is very lightly loaded even during the day.  The transfer is
from a SCSI disk to the DLT tape on the same chain.  If that's not fast
enough, I could (in order) put either the disk or the tape on the second
SCSI chain (68-pin FW-SE) or move it to one of the SGIs.

> 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.

Mine, too.

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

I'm pretty careful with my stuff, but that's probebly not under my control.

-Shel