Hi Robin,

We use STK 9840 drives in an STK9710 robot (forerunner of the L700, I
think).
Mount time for the 9840 is under 30 seconds; maybe 40 seconds to write for
an append.
Dismount is also very fast because they rewind to the middle of the tape
instead of the beginning, I think.

The faster drives make running collocation quite painless; even if you have
to mount 10 tapes on a restore, that only adds 5 minutes total to the
restore time.

The 9840 is in the same class as the IBM 3590 drive; MUCH faster to mount
and locate than DLT. (and yep, lots more $)

We tried DLT drives in the 9710 first.  Worked OK for our low-volume TSM
server; just couldn't take the pounding on our high-volume TSM server.  We
especially got hurt by the DLT "false cleans".  Too much start/stop/append
activity on the tapes made them subject to I/O errors on readback; each time
you get an I/O error it triggers a false clean; so doing the restore you get
up to 3 minutes to mount, plus another 3-6 minutes to process the cleaning
tape after the tape dismounts!  That was a killer.

Your mileage may vary....

************************************************************************
Wanda Prather
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
443-778-8769
wanda_prather AT jhuapl DOT edu

"Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" -
Scott Adams/Dilbert
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