SUMMARY: 3rd party 4mm DAT drives

From: Kyle Strohm (strohm@sunshine.mathsci.denison.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 16 1993 - 13:47:23 CDT


ORIGINAL QUESTION:

>Hello Sun mgrs,

>Since SMCC requires Solaris 2.x to use the new 4mm DAT, I am looking for
>a 3rd party drive. I've looked into the Exabyte models, which I think
>Sun has used in the past.

>Any information concerning good 3rd party DAT drives, as well as any
>kernel mods/device drivers associated with such, would be
>very appreciated. I will summarize.

>PS I am using SunOS 4.1.3.

RESPONSES: (as always, thanks for the help!)

>From raoul@Athena.MIT.EDU Tue Jul 13 07:24:09 1993

R-Squared, in Colorado, and Eli Heffron's in Boston, and Polaris in
Boston all have been good suppliers for us. We had an Exabyte from
R-Squared that worked quite well for over a year: it got flood-damaged
and is now replaced with one from Polaris, which also works quite
well.

Everybody basically repackages the same units for Exabyte drives. In
your shoes, I would look for price, familiar service, and a local
hot-swap. Also, make sure you have the right SCSI cables for your
system (this lead to some confusion when I bought the R-Squared box,
which used D-50 connectors).

-- 
    Nico Garcia
    raoul@athena.mit.edu

>From doug@perry.berkeley.edu Tue Jul 13 16:51:50 1993 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT

I am using HP DAT drive 35480A (2 GB, plus compression), and ApUnix's "ht" device driver. After a few initial bugs, I am very happy. It supports fixed and variable block mode, compression and non-compression (although I am not using compression). Throughput is non-compressed modes is still limited byt the 185 KB/sec transfer limit. ApUnix can be reached at 1-800-8AP-UNIX - Doug Neuhauser, doug@perry.berkeley.edu, 510-642-0931

>From pjb@23kgroup.com Tue Jul 13 21:59:10 1993

try boxhill systems at 212.989.4455. ask for carol. tell her i sent you...

>From jay@silence.princeton.nj.us Tue Jul 13 23:43:16 1993

Buy your drive from Apunix. They are generally competitive and they provide excellent support, including a device driver and miscellaneous software.

...jay

800/827-8649 . Apunix Computer Services 619/495-9229 5575 Ruffin Road, Suite 110 San Diego CA 92123 619/495-9230 f fax

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 08:32:53 -0400 (EDT) From: shankar@ulysses.att.com

In the past, I have used a DAT drive from Box-hill.

They supply the driver, and if you are running 4.1.3, I think their drivers are dynamically loadable, so you don't need to rebuild your kernel.

We never had any problems with the drive; Ofcourse, we only had it for a few months.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shankar Ishwar AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. E-mail: shankar@ulysses.att.com V-mail: (908) 582-6471

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 10:57:51 -0400 (EDT) From: uusr037!ironman!patti@uu2.psi.com (Patti Stirk)

Call Judy McCormick at AnDATAco, she'll fix you right up! 1.800.827.9740 Patti Stirk Soft Systems Engineering

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 08:52:40 -0700 (PDT) From: howie@warlok.ds.boeing.com (Howard Modell)

We're also using 4.1.3, and we just got an ArchiveST 4000DAT drive. It's made by Maynard Electronics, which is apparently a British firm(?), part of Archive Corp. (I'll give the addresses in a while). It wasn't what we originally tried to get, but the wa

It required an addition to the /sys/scsi/targets/st_conf.c file, but that's described in the Installation Notes.

According to my notes, it cost ~$2200, but I don't know what discounts were involved.

The address for Maynard is: Maynard Electronics Div. Archive Corp. 36 Skyline Dr. Lake Mary, FL 32746 (407) 263-3500 (407)263-3555 FAX (800)227-6296

Hope this helps you!

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 93 12:13:40 PDT From: perryh@pluto.rain.com (Perry Hutchison)

Exabyte is not DAT, it is 8mm. The Exabyte 8200 (2.3Gb) works well under SunOS 4.1.1 (and presumably with later releases) with no kernel mods or added drivers.

From: helios!electron.var.com!scb@uunet.UU.NET (Steve Brown) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 09:28:11 -0700 (PDT)

I have been using an Archive DAT for the past six months or so without a hitch on a 670 running 4.1.3. To add the drive I modified:

/usr/kvm/sys/scsi/targets/st_conf.c:

and remade the kernel. After doing so, the following message is displayed at boot time.

Jul 3 22:50:26 electron vmunix: st1: <ArchiveST 4mm DAT/DAT-DC>

The version of the drive I use will write 2GB of data on a 90 meter tape, there is a newer version which I (think) doubles the storage capacity.

-------------------- ----------------------

Kyle Strohm Denison University Computer Center System Administrator Granville, Ohio 43023 strohm@sunshine.mathsci.denison.edu (614) 587-6333



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