At 5:36 Uhr +0200 01.08.1998, Allen Briggs wrote:

>I don't foresee any problems with any DDS-2 drive under NetBSD, although
>the mac SCSI drivers haven't seen tapes too much...  I haven't seen any
>DDS-2 tape drives, myself, so I can't tell you anything about them.

For all that I have seen, tape handling (as SCSI handling in general) in
NetBSD has some rough edges, although there have been recent changes wrt.
end of media detection.

As to DDS drives: At work, we have about a dozen defective DAT streamers
(mostly HP) from customers lying in the corners. They tend to
degrade/deadjust silently, and when the heads finally die, we all too often
discover that the backup tapes are not readable by other streamers. When
the DAT drive of our fileserver died, we got a Tandberg 5G QIC drive - no
problems so far, and the cartridges simply look safer than the toyish DDS
media. They are more expensive, though. But then - why doing backups when
the data is not worth the effort, anyway?

That's why I got a Tandberg for home use, too.

>-allen
>
>--
>                    Allen Briggs - briggs@ninthwonder.com


	hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)