Anyone using Super DLT's?

[bommer]

We're on Networker 6.x, HP-UX 11.0, STK 9710 Silos. We're looking to upgrade from DLT7000's.

 

[ejgarcia]

You have to update the microcode of your 9710 and later buy a SDLT drive and install it.

 

[jsargent]

I'm on Legato 6.1.1 on Windows 2000 with a STK 9710. I just upgraded from 3 DLT7000's to 6 SDLT drives. Out of the 6, 2 were DOA and had to be replaced. Then they all worked great for a couple of weeks, (and yes, they scream) but now I keep getting "Read Open Error:No media in drive" errors on all of the drives sporadically. I've tried increasing the eject, load, and unload timeouts, but nothing seems to help. I've finally told my vendor that if it's not working by Friday, I want all new drives on Monday. It's pretty ridiculous. But when they work, they're dang fast and hold a ton of data. I average around 200GB per tape. The least I've gotten is 151GB, and the most is 239GB on one tape. That's awesome.

 

[bommer]

Do your Read Open errors tie up the drives affected or does Networker mount another tape to the drive and go about its business? I have similar problems with my DLT7000's even with the latest firmware. Let me know if the problem continues. STK is supposed to get us a demo drive to test, but it will be on a separate system outside the 9710.

 

[dkl2002]

We were getting many read open errors on drives that were only a year old which resulted in at least one drive a night disabling itself. We finally replaced all four drives in the jukebox and haven't had this problem since. The service tech who replaced the drives said it wasn't uncommon for the drives to go after only a year.

 

[MS88]

We have used individual SDLT drives and have had a lot of media problems and drive failures. We get a lot of media errors and have had to have our operators inspect each tape by hand before loading them to insure that the wheel is centered properly. It's a pain. We are investigating LTO. Anyone have anything to say about LTO?

 

[cptb]

Apparently LTO has a lot better reliability than SDLT. If you're investing in SDLT anyway, make sure you begin with installing the latest FirmWare on the drives to get as few Read open errors/Failure to unload errors and I/O errors as possible.

 

[dmayes]

You might also consider STK's 9840 technology.

Reliability was our number 1 priority.

On top of that...they're very fast (19MB/sec with bigasm).

Next rev. will double capacity (at least that's the rumour).