Travan SCSI tape random failures

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003, Trevor Blackwell wrote:
>
>I'm running 4.7-RELEASE on a dual P4-Xeon machine and trying to back up
>to a Seagate 10/20 GB Travan tape drive:
>
...
>When I write to it, it usually fails after a few hundred MB, but the
>amount of data is not repeatable even when I write identical files. For
>example:

The Travan tape drives are slightly more reliable than the old Colorado
Memory Systems Junko floppy tape drives, but not much.

We used Travan drives for about a year on several systems, but found that
they often had problmes with apparent tape failures, possible drive
misalignment, etc.

We're now doing a lot of our backups using external FireWire 120gb hard
drives.  They're less expensive than reliable high capacity SCSI DLT drives
and the associated media (DLT tapes to back up 120gb cost about the same as
the external FireWire drives).

Bill
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