🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <242@uwslh.UUCP>, dem@uwslh.UUCP (David E. Miran) writes:
> At the Wisconsin State Hygiene Laboratory we are using an SI 9700
> tape system on our VAX-11/750 with about 1.2 Gigabytes of disk space.
> This is actually a Storage Technology model 1953 Tridensity tape
> drive (800/1600/6250) that runs at 125 ips.  [...]
> We are very happy with it and I haven't yet seen anything that would
> give better performance if you want to be able to dump a lot of stuff
> to tape fast.

I am currently using an SI 9700 as the _only_ tape drive on a network
of Suns and Vaxes with about 2,900 Megabytes of disks in various
flavours (and we fully expect to add another 2,00 or 3,000 Megs in
the next year :-) which we back up to level 0 once a month,
incrementals daily via the usual towers-of-hanoi scheme.  The drive
is about 4 years old now, and has had 2 major failures - the r/w head
wore out, and a vacuum leak that made it refuse to load tapes.  Total
down time == about 3 days.  We do our backups (the much maligned
dump/restore pair) early in the mornings and usually have them done
well before user load becomes serious.  The drive is faster than the
11/785 it's tied onto right now; a Sun 3/280 _might_ be able to race
it, but there's no way to find out since I don't have a 3/280 (yet!).
I like the drive, and recommend it highly.  The only problem with it
is that sometimes it won't autoload small (600') reels, and then you
have to intervene manually.  I don't know if this is the best
price/performance example around, but the performance itself is fine.