PowerVault 100T TR40 Travan

[Seth Mos]

At 10:23 28-1-2003 -0500, bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

>   Problems:
>
>   - tar will write some amount of data (less then 500 MB) and then fail
>     with a short write error.
>   - tar or mt will randomly fail with "I/O error" messages
>   - tar or mt will randomly hang in the D (uninterruptible sleep) state.
>     Ejecting the tape will sometimes cause them to unwedge and abort;
>     other times the system will need to be rebooted.
>   - The drive will wedge and refuse to do anything (even eject the tape)
>     until power cycled.
>   - Tons of errors in the kernel log about the device whenever it is in use.

Seems reasonable for a Travan tape drive. We had these problems very 
frequently under windows NT4. The exact same problems. The NCR Unix box we 
had did better about 4 times actually.

For every Travan tape failure we had on the unix box we had 4 of them on 
the nt4 box. About every 5th tape or so.

We replaced them with Exabyte drives and never had a single backup fail in 
1.5 years. Except for arcserve problems.

Note: this was _not_ Dell hardware but NCR material. Sort of.

Cheers

--
Seth
It might just be your lucky day, if you only knew.