Pre-formatted tapes for HP drives

[j.j.tupper]

In article <433 at iccdev.UUCP> bill at iccdev.UUCP (Bill Gaines) writes:
>Yes it is.  We  never  buy the  tapes  from HP.  We buy 3M  DC615HC  and
>DC600HC tapes and certify them  ourselves.  I haven't  tried it on a 300
>series, but our 800 series has a program  called  "mediainit"  that will
>certify  these  tapes  that  have  not  been  certified.  Buy  doing  it
>ourselves,  it saves  us about  $15 per tape we buy.  If you  don't  run
>mediainit on these tapes, you will not be able to use them.

We use the 3M tapes (DC-600HC) in 2 9144 drives and a 35401 autochanger.
We don't ever bother running mediainit and have no problems. I think this
is because the later models of HP drives (like ours) do auto sparing of bad
blocks on the fly. [I *know* that ours has a read while write head to check
for errors as it writes, unlike earlier tape drives.]
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sdflkjreo vdklfj		(my real signature is illegible too)