exabyte drive
8 messages in this thread
Hi all,
Can anyone recommend which exabyte drive would be the best to get, and which
are most commonly used in service bureaus.
Thanks,
Andrew Sinagra
Digital Art & Motion
I decided to go with the 8505xl. In fact, it arrived here earlier today and
it's still in the box — which I'm about to remedy! 🙂
Most service bureaus use the 8500 and they have trouble with the 8505 tapes
since they are formatted differently. HOWEVER, with a little piece of software
from the Exabyte BBS called CTS Monitor, the firmware settings on the 8505 can
be modified to read/write/format in 8500 mode, so there you go.
Besides the fact that 8500 has been discontinued, the 8505 is faster, more
durable (greater MTBF), and the compression feature is good for system backups.
— James — Choreo Motion —
Note: Exabyte BBS: (303)447-7100
Offhand, I'd say the 8200 is the most popular. But your best plan of
attack is to call the service bureaus that you're going to use, and
ask them what they have. You might want to buy a newer model for
other reasons, of course. However, it's sometimes difficult to find
software to reset the modes of fancier drives to emulate the 8200, so
there are compatibility issues, too.
The 8200 is not a good drive to recommend. It uses the SCSI-1 programming set
and many of the newer software packages may/will have problems using it. This
drive does not have a Locate command therefore you cannot (quickly) position
the tape to an arbitrary position within a file. The Exabyte 8205 (in
compression mode) and the 8500, 8500c, 8505 and 8505xl are SCSI-2 command set
compatible and will present little or no problems with newer software.
–Jim
I wasn't recommending the 8200. I just relayed my impression that many service
bureaus or SGI set-ups still had 8200s. The software problem is a matter of
whether each of the systems in the loop are able to reset the 8xxx into a mode
that's compatible with the other tape drive. For example, short of changing
DIP switches, how could you throw an 8500 into 8200-compatibility mode, if you
were writing a tape on the PC, expecting to pass it to an 8200 system?
We have a program that writes TAR files to our exabyte tape drive that can set
it to all different types of modes, including 8200 (it is an 8505), with or
without compression. One of our IBM workstations has an 8200, and it reads the
pc tar tape just fine. I believe you can download a little program that will
set the modes from the exabyte bbs, I'm told.
This is a program for the PC?
Yes, It is called Novatar, and it is put out by the Novastor people. Kinda
spendy, but it works.