[rescue] VS80 DLT tape drive question

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- "Curtis H. Wilbar Jr." <rescue at hawkmountain.net>
wrote:

> I might have to experiment... even with Ultra SCSI,
> 6M/sec should
> be attainable.... so if the drive tops out (in
> compressed mode) at 6M/sec
> I shouldn't be shoeshining even at 10M/sec SCSI.
> 
> I did have the tar running as time tar ... so I got:
> 313m34.661s to backup 43678188K (as reported by du
> -sk)
> 
> That translates to: 42654.48M/18814.66s = 2.27M/sec
> 
> Most of the data was .tgz, .iso, .zip, etc... so I'd
> expect to see not
> much over 3MB/sec... so... maybe not bad considering
> there were
> periods of shoeshining.

Yeah, it should be faster than that - and it ought not
shoeshine too much. Do you have a cleaning tape for
the drive? If the heads are dirty, poor performance
will result. A CleaningTape III is used for all of the
DLTX000 drives. Don't know about VS80, but I'd
_imagine_...

> Now... on bulk erasing DLTs... any idea of a Radio
> Shack bulk eraser
> is going to have the 'punch' required ?  works great
> on floppies (I've
> 'rescued' lots of floppies that would format with
> bad sectors by bulk
> erasing and reformatting)... but I seem to recall
> trying a VCR tape at
> one point and it not being very effective.

Yeah, I don't know how much that Radio Shack eraser
will be able to do - 3 1/2" HD floppies are 720
orsted, and DLTIV tapes are 1850. VHS is only 700 - so
it should work on those if it worked on floppies.
Worth a shot though. For the most part, you just need
to erase enough of the header info to trick the drive
into re-writing it in a new format.

> on bulk erasing.... bulk erase top, top and bottom,
> or the sides ?  Which
> way will orient the magnetic field of the bulk erase
> for maximum
> effect ?

I'd bulk erase the top, bottom, front, edges, back,
and the clear plastic case it came in. You need all
the help you can get with that little eraser :)

-Ian