Videotape unreliable?

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Article #9825

#9825

From: jimc
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 1988 02:05

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We have a 8mm 2.2Gbyte SCSI tape system from Software Associates which we
are using for dumps, about 1 Gbyte in 16 various-sized files.  This system
uses the standard Sun SCSI driver (SunOS v3.5).  Frequently it performs
fine, but on 10-20% of the dump sets it will dump a few files, get an I/O
error, and be unable to recover.  That is, that dump cannot continue and
all subsequent dumps also get I/O errors, likely on the first write.  This
behavior seems like a bad spot on tape but is not repeatable.  

Has anyone seen this behavior -- and what did you do about it?  If the
cure is a smarter device driver that can recover from temporary write
failures, a pointer to such a driver would be appreciated.  Thank you.  

James F. Carter        (213) 825-2897
UCLA-Mathnet;  6608B MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA  90024-1555
ARPA: jimc@math.ucla.edu            BITNET: jimc%math.ucla.edu@INTERBIT

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!cwjcc!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request
From: jimc@math.ucla.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Videotape unreliable?
Message-ID: <8812131900.AA25887@julia.math.ucla.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 88 02:05:22 GMT
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Organization: Ardent Computer Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
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Original-Date: Tue, 13 Dec 88 11:00:20 PST
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 67, message 4 of 20