At 10:51 AM 7/28/97 -0400, Steve Roder wrote:
>I received a private response to mine where the library was an STK 9710
>with 3 DLT7000's.  This person nearly described my problems exactly.  I
>think the problems are the drives.  Perhaps someone at Cornell could
>comment.  I think they have had a Q47 with DLT4000's for quite some time.

True, we have had a Q47 with DLT4000 drives for about 14 months now.
Drives and library are s/e narrow SCSI.
We first had these attached to an RS6000/41T ADSM Server, for about 10
months, with virtually no problems.  About 4 months ago, we moved our ADSM
server to our new SP2.  In the process, we made a cardinal sin and changed
too many variables at once:  AIX upgrade, ADSM upgrade, hardware change,
SCSI change.  Now we are having intermittent I/O problems.  I don't want to
publically fault the DLT4000 drives, since I have not yet been able to
identify the source of our problems.  Our current I/O configuration is
somewhat atypical.  The SP2 high node has D/E F/W adapters.  We are using
Parallan converters to convert from D/E to S/E, and cables to convert from
F/W to narrow.  As I say, it works most of the time, but we now get sporadic
I/O errors, which we find unacceptable and are in the process of trying to
resolve.

We have no experience with DLT7000 drives, but were considering them for our
next robot.  I have found the comments about them very relevant, since we were
thinking about using them.

Mark Cecil said:
>I think Breece Hill just doesn't do any mods to the drives to get them to
work
>in the library (from a guts standpoint), although I do know that the doors
>are different, with an actuator for the library.  But other than that, I
think
>they are stock DLT's without skins.

Actually, the firmware IS customized by Breece Hill for use in their
libraries.
I found this out the hard way, by attempting to load Quantum firmware into the
drives way back when we first got our Q47.  A call to Breece Hill
discovered that they have mods to the DLT firmware for use in their
library.  I believe both companies provide firmware via the net.

..Paul