[nycbug-talk] tape drive woes

[Dan Langille]

On 4 Feb 2005 at 11:06, Tillman Hodgson wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 11:19:37AM -0500, Dan Langille wrote:
> > On 3 Feb 2005 at 22:11, Tillman Hodgson wrote:
> > > 
> > >   camcontrol negotiate da0 -R10 -q -a
> > > 
> > > I'm simply moving the bus from 20MHz to 10MHz which, at 16 bits
> > > wide, moves me from 40MB/s to 20MB/s. That's more than fast enough
> > > for the drives I have in the JBOD (which aren't ever accessed
> > > simultaneously with the use I've put them to) and all top out at
> > > about 12MB/s anyway).
> > 
> > I've not tried that yet.  Last night, I tried a DDS-2 tape. I was
> > able to back up.  But I still think something is wrong.  It's a
> > DDS-4 drive, and I was unable to do a backup on a DDS-4 tape.
> > 
> > While it was labelling the tape, a bit of tape would be fed through,
> > then the unit would "click" three times, rewind, and read the tape
> > again, click three times, repeat... several times.
> 
> That sounds more like a mechanism problem. Is this a fresh tape? If
> not, does retensioning it cause the same clicking?

The DDS-2 was brand new, fresh out the wrapper.  I'll try the 
retensioning tonight.  For those wondering: mt -f /dev/sa0 retension
-- 
Dan Langille : http://www.langille.org/
BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference - http://www.bsdcan.org/