On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 01:58:05PM -0400, Edward Mulholland wrote:
>
> I am running Debian using the 2.0.36 kernel on my home PC, and I'm looking
> for an inexpensive tape drive. The Linux compatibility HOWTO as well as
> the ftape home-page information at
>
> http://zeus.instmath.rwth-aachen.de/~heine/ftape/
>
> both state that the Iomega Ditto Max drives should work with the latest
> version of ftape. However, I noticed that Iomega has sold the right to
> manufacture Ditto Max drives to Tecmar. If I buy Tecmar's current 10GB
> internal Ditto Max Pro drive--the specifications are at
>
> http://www.tecmar.com/ditto/products/dm10gb.html
>
> --will it work with my kernel and with ftape? I would greatly appreciate
> advice from any ftape gurus or users of Ditto Max drives.
I have an Iomega one which works fine; I would have thought that the
Tecmar one's would work as well, as I doubt that they have changed
anything (except maybe every occurence of 'Iomega' to 'Tecmar' :-)
However, I'm not sure that I'd recommend the drive. For a start, I
can only get it to stream (ie. not shoeshine) at a transfer rate of
2 Mbps. 3 Mbps causes slight underruns, and 4 Mbps (the maximum)
simply doesn't work. Consider how many hours this takes for the full 5
Gb!
This may be something to do with IO to my hard drive (IDE, slooooow) -
almost every time it is accessed (ie. makes a noise lasting more than
1 second) the tape underruns.
I was writing a buffering program to help it along at 3 Mbps, as all
the ones I could find on Freshmeat either didn't work with a fixed
block size or didn't do exactly what was needed. I haven't looked at
it in a while, as I recently got a CD rewriter and use that instead
for backing up just home directories.
It would probably help if the drive had its own hardware buffer, like
CD rewriters do; I don't think it does.
One other point - I had big problems with the tape jamming and
becoming unusable (and data unrecoverable without large expense); but
this appears to have been solved by a replacement drive. I am lacking
the data I lost, though.
Maybe a SCSI solution would be better for you - the adapters and
drives are (much) more expensive, but the tapes are much cheaper; and
I suspect that they would run much smoother (or perhaps an IDE-based
tape drive?)
HTH,
Robie.
--
Robie Basak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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