Hey Alexandre,
What timing... I just happen to have at least 1 and possibly as many
as 3 brand new DLT4000 drives that I need to sell! They came a few
weeks ago in grant systems and have never been used. Our shop is all
8 mm and we want to stick with that line for backward compatibility
reasons. So I'd like to convert the DLT drives to cash to put towards
buying AIT. (Wow, after 2+ years of quite pleasant DLT experience in
my previous shop I never thought I'd ever be heard saying that!)
If this is something you might be interested in, let me know and we'll
work something out. You would need to add a power supply and enclosure
since these drives were internal configuration.
Meanwhile my best recollection on the 4000/7000 compatibility question
is that the 7000 will read tapes written by a 4000, but not vice-versa.
The tapes used by the 4000 to do 20/40 GB are actually the exact same
media used by the 7000 to do 35/70 GB. That seems like the first
warning sign!
On the other hand you shouldn't take it from me since I have no direct
7000 experience. I'm quite certain you'll run into trouble trying to
read anything written by an 8000 on any earlier drive since the 8000
is the first in the line to do variable density. (If data isn't coming
in fast enough, it keeps the tape moving and decreases the write
density. I think AIT-2 does this, too.)
-Mitch
On 18 Nov 2000, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> So, the local sysadmin has finally decided to put into operation a
> DLT4700 robot that had been purchased a couple of years ago. I've
> managed to convince them to buy a backup tape drive, in case the robot
> fails. However, they can't seem to find any DLT4000 tape drives for
> sale any more, they're considering purchasing a DLT7000 drive, in the
> hopes that:
>
> (i) in case the DLT4000 robot fails, the DLT7000 tape drive will be
> able to read backups done with it, and
>
> (ii) after the DLT4000 robot is fixed, it will be able to read tapes
> written by the DLT7000 drive.
>
> Since they're total newbies with this DLT stuff (and so am I, mind you
> ;-), I thought I'd ask here for advice. We don't even know whether
> there's any newer kind of DLT tape we should avoid because our old
> tape unit wouldn't be able to cope with it (and I wouldn't trust a
> local reseller would warn us about that :-), and/or if we should take
> any special measures when writing to old-fashioned DLT tapes on the
> newer drive so as to make sure they will be readable by the older
> drive. We'll probably stick to 20GB (native, 40GB with compression)
> tapes, since we've already got some of those.
>
> Thanks in advance for any advice,
>
> --
> Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
> Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
> CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
> Free Software Evangelist *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me
>
