SUMMARY: Exabyte 8505 on Solaris 2.X?

From: Robert J. Cronin (rjcronin@uop.com)
Date: Tue Nov 02 1993 - 11:47:40 CST


Thanks again SunManagers!

I asked:

>
> I am considering the purchase of a SS1000 or SC2000, and need to know
> whether the Exabyte 8505 (half height with hardware compression) is
> supported. I have been told by Sun that it is not supported under
> Solaris 2.X !?! However, in 4.1.X, I need only change a byte or two in
> stconf to add support.
>
> Has anyone tried an EXB8505 in compressed mode on a Solaris 2.X machine?
>

I got a mixture of yes's and no's, which I now summarize from most
positive to most negative:

1 SS1000 Sol 2.? boot -r and 8505 works great

2 SS2+ Sol 2.2 boot -r and works great

3 Classic Sol 2.2 8505 works fine.

4 SC2000 Sol 2.2 works fine after Exabyte firmware upgrade

5 ?? ?? Patched /kernel/drv/st.o to work with
                                8500C. 8505 just as easy.

6 SS2 Sol 2.2 works MOST of the time. Sometimes new
                                tapes only write in 8200 mode.

7 LX ?? soft errors > 10%; fast SCSI problem??

8 ?? Sol 2.0 2.1 2.2 8505 won't be recognized and won't function.
                                Sol 2.3 may provide possibilities.

9 SC2000 SunOS 5.2 8500C didn't work. Sun said it was unsupported
        LX SunOS 5.2 and referred him back to drive supplier.

I prefer to believe the positive answers! So, I include 3 winners
below:

----- Begin Edited Message -----
  we have a SS1000, and a EXB8505, and both have been working great
  together for months. We did not have to apply any patches, just
  hooked up the drive and did 'boot -r' to reconfigure the kernel.
  On our machine, the devices under Solaris are designated as
  follows:
          /dev/rmt/0 - defaults to highest possible density
          /dev/rmt/0h - ~10.0 Gb with compression
          /dev/rmt/0m - 8500 mode, 5.0 Gb
          /dev/rmt/0l - 8200 mode, 2.5 Gb
  An additional note: we also have an 8500 connected to another
                      Solaris machine. On that machine, /dev/rmt/0h
                      produces an error, as '0m' (5.0 Gb) is the
                      highest supported density of the 8500.
----- End Edited Message -----

----- Begin Edited Message -----
Ours just arrived today and we connected it to our Sparc 2+ running
Solaris 2.2. A simple boot -r created all the devices necessary:
        /dev/rst4
        /dev/rst12
        /dev/rst20
        /dev/rst28
        /dev/nrst8
        /dev/nrst12
        /dev/nrst20
        /dev/nrst28
The devices that end in 4 are the 2.5 GB uncompressed format
The devices that end in 12 are the 5.0 GB compressed format
The devices that end in 20 are the 5.0 GB uncompressed format
The devices that end in 28 are the 10.0 GB compressed format
I have tested the nrst4 and nrst28 devices and they both worked
correctly. I have not made any modifications to the system. Simply
plug reboot and play!
----- End Edited Message -----

----- Begin Edited Message -----
Yes. I have a SparClassic server running Solaris 2.2. We have an Exabyte
8505 on it. The drive is packaged by Northeast Peripherals, but any enclosure
will do. It functions fine and seems to act the way the mtio(7) man page says
it should.
I just ran some tests copying my raw root partition to the tape using dd.
The root partition is ~16MB. The system was quiet. The command was:
dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 of=/dev/rmt/0X bs=64k
where X was l, m, h, and c. There is considerable startup time for any 8mm,
so I won't try to calcualte data transfer rates, but the elapsed time for the
commands was as follows:
X Mode Elapsed time
-----------------------------------------------------------
l 8200 mode 2:02
m 8500 mode 1:14
h 8200 compressed mode 1:01
c 8500 compressed mode 0:53
I recommend the drive. Incidently, we also have one on a DEC Alpha OSF/1.
There is takes some mods to one of the kernel SCSI modules.
----- End Edited Message -----

Many thanks to all who responded:

>From: "Robert D. Worsham" <worsham@aer.com>
>From: adap@andrews.edu (Edsel Adap)
>From: Stephen Campbell <steve@avalon.Dartmouth.EDU>
>From: tdaly@eleceng.adelaide.edu.au
>From: sten@ergon.ch (Sten Gunterberg)
>From: djm@blue.Millipore.COM (Drew Montag)
>From: cfoley@arsenic.cray.com (Chuck Foley)
>From: djiracek@jupiter.fnbc.com (Dan Jiracek)
>From: poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
>From: osicki@hasler.ascom.ch (Chris Osicki)
>From: Ake.Sandgren@cs.umu.se (]ke Sandgren)

Bob Cronin
(RJCronin@uop.com)



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