Recently we purchased two Exabyte 8500c tape drives. These tape drives,
unlike the "Exabyte 8500" tape drive, are equipped with Exabyte's
long-awaited compression board (based upon one of IBM's compression
algorithms) which is supposed to raise the capacity of an 8mm tape
anywhere from 5 to 25 GBytes, depending on the type of data being
backed up.
Currently, we are running AFS 3.2 in an exclusive Risc/Ultrix environment.
Running "fms" on this tape drive produced the following output:
Tape capacity is 102945767424 bytes (~100 GB !!!)
File marks are 84912587 bytes ( ~81 MB !!!)
In the past, on Exabyte 8500 tape drives without compression we have used
a tape capacity of "4500M" and a file mark size of "1M". These settings
were successful. Consequently, rightly or wrongly, we decided to use these
same numbers for the Exabyte 8500c.
Unfortunately, when we ran the AFS 3.2 backup using the "4500M" and "1M"
numbers, the backup was rather hastily aborted (5 minutes or so after
starting the tape backup) with an "butm: Error writing end of tape." error.
We would prefer not to have to use trial and error to get this to work.
Has anyone had any experience with using the Exabyte 8500c for AFS 3.2
backups? If so, what tapeconfig parameters do you use? More specifically,
does anyone have any suggestions about what the proper tapeconfig
paramters for the Exabyte 8500c on Ultrix/Risc machines (running ultrix 4.2)
might be? Any help is much appreciated.
Sincerely,
Steven McElwee
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Steven McElwee | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Computer ASSIST Center |
401 North Bldg | (919) 660-6914 - office
Duke University, Durham, NC 27706 | (919) 684-8651 - phone
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