Andataco Exabyte subsystem

[Tom Zepf]

In article <8720 at brazos.Rice.edu> you write:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 207, message 12
>
>I am preparing to purchase a Exabyte subsystem from Andataco, and wondered
>if any of you sun.experts had any experience with Exabyte drives from
>these folks.  I am planning to put it on a SS1 with 16 MB memory running
>SunOS4.1.  I would be grateful for any insight you can provide on this
>combination.

We have purchased two Exabyte drives from Andataco over the last year and
a half. I have one connected to a 3/60 and the other connected to a 3/260.
I am currently running SunOS 4.1, but have used the drives with SunOS
4.0.1. The original drive we bought worked fine for about a year, but
pretty much doesn't work at all now. We get write retry errors if we write
big files. Cleaning the tape drive does not seem to help. Both drives have
a hard time living on the SCSI bus with other peripherals. They seem to
hang sometimes, forcing a reboot. Overall, I would still recommend
Exabytes: their price/performance can't be beat.  I just have two so I can
hope that at least one is working at all times.  Maybe someday I'll move
to DAT if I hear it is more reliable. What I would really like is a
MagnetoOptical drive, but that costs too much! Backups here would be
impossible, or nearly so, without the Exabytes. It's definitely a
love/hate relationship.

Please note that this is not a complaint against Andataco. They have been
extremely helpful (being a block away can't hurt I suppose...). None of
their hardware has failed, it is the Exabyte drive itself which is
somewhat unreliable. We have purchased quite a bit of equipment from them
and have been satisfied. In fact, I like their enclosures more than any we
have used yet. And they are very price competitive.

We have several Sparcstation SLCs on order, and I intend to hook one of
the Exabytes up to one of these, but I have not tried a Exabyte with a SS1
or SS1+ yet. I've heard rumors that the driver is not built into the sun4c
kernel, but I can't verify this. I suppose I'll find out soon...

Tom Zepf					Optigraphics Corporation
uunet!optigfx!zepf				9339 Carroll Park Drive
scubed!optis31!zepf				San Diego, CA 92121
						(619)292-6060