[2072] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: Tape drive, Exabyte EXB-8200
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Beach)
Thu Jun 26 12:25:26 1997
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 1997 03:03:56 +1000
From: Michael Beach <mbeach@awa.com.au>
Reply-To: mbeach@awa.com.au
To: JOHNSON G L <gjx@dsgjx4.dsrd.ornl.gov>
CC: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
JOHNSON G L wrote:
>
> Hello, I have an Exabyte EXB-8200 scsi tape drive
> on an Adaptec 2940AU scsi control board. I am running
> Redhat 4.1, Linux kernal 2.0.30. I was able to get
> satisfactory performance with a Digital TLZ07 which
> I borrowed from a colleague, but I can NOT get the Exabyte
> 8200 to work. What 'mt' parameters, etc. do I need to
> make the Exabyte EXB-8200 work OK?
>
What do you mean by "work"? I have such a drive, and it is doing just
what I want it to do. In what way does it not do what you want?
I didn't *need* to set any mt parameters to get it to go, but I plan on
studying the manual to see if I can set some to optimise the performance
a little.
The only caveats I discovered were that it doesn't like back spacing
over files (after reading bits of the manuals, I don't think such a
thing is possible) but forward space is fine, and that blocked
reads/writes of data make it *much* happier. The native block size is
1K, so read and write in multiples of that and all is just dandy. It
will let you write smaller, and won't pad your writes, but if you try to
read back more data than was written to the file (say if you are reading
back in 1K blocks, but the file isn't an exact number of blocks in
length) it doesn't just give back less than a block of data for the last
read, but barfs with some error, and won't talk sense again until you
rewind the tape.
Note that what I have written above describes what I get with an 8200
and the st.o driver from 2.0.29, without any tweaking of st.o parameters
with mt. I can't say for sure whether all of the behaviours I have
observed are due to the 8200, or the are partly due to the st.o driver
or my (lack of) settings. When I got the drive, it had no manuals. I
made it work by trial and error, then later acquired the manuals. When I
have time I plan to go through them and figure out the real story.
> Garry Johnson 423-574-9623 gjx@ornl.gov
>
> fax 423-574-7624
>
> Thanx :-)
Regards
M.Beach
