Answer for Questions on 8mm tape drive

Subject: Exabyte 2.3 GB Doug, We have recently purchased a Cybernetics 8mm tape drive and find it works fairly well on our unix system configured as our 9-track tape drive. We had some problems trying to connect both the 9-track tape drive and the 8mm using the same controller. Cybernetics tells us it will work and our UNISYS technician says it will not. Have not had time to get all this worked out. It works fine as long as it is the only item on the cable. The speed is more or less dependant on your operating system and writes using tar or afio as fast as it would going disk to disk. Understand with a controller and software of it's own it is possible to write at much higher speeds than we are getting with tar or afio. Because we do unattended back-ups of our database at night and the disk where we backed up our system disk to disk has become too small, it was necessary to obtain a larger disk and tape system. Howwever, the speed of the back-ups doesn't hurt us much because we are doing them at night by cron. We do not have Informix on the system we have the 8mm tape drive, but if this system works ok we will be adding them to our other systems. Cheryl Gross (903) 334-3518 Red River Army Depot Texarkana, Texas