The best I could find is:

ftp://ftp.legato.com/pub/HW_Support/compatguide/stinit.def

George Sinclair wrote:

Can anyone recommend which drive manufacturer to use for LTO-3 (HP, IBM or Quantum (Certance)?

Does anyone overtly not recommend IBM or had bad experiences with these?

We have NW 7.2.2 running on a Linux RH storage node with a Storagetek L80 tape library, currently running older Seagate LTO-1 drives. STK shipped us four IBM LTO-3 drives for our LTO-3 upgrade (same tape library).

I can't get any technical support from IBM since the equipment is not under contract with IBM. I've been unable to locate an online manual for these drives. I searched through IBM's site and elsewhere and could not find anything that discusses any specifics regarding these drives in regards to keyword values for Linux stinit.def entries like timeout, long-timeout, etc. Legato's documentation specifically states that Linux uses stinit.def, and their hardware compatibility guide suggests using the Linux st driver as this has been tested.

I found some information at Quantum's site and one other st_conf.c document pertaining to Sun, and these seem to corroborate that the density code would be 0x44 for LTO-3, 0x42 for LTO-2, etc. but nothing about the various keyword values or timeout

values.

Legato's documentation is very limited. The only place I could find a sample stinit.def was under the Linux installation guide (pdf), but this doesn't even include LTO, and mentions that the compatibility guides contain stinit information, but I couldn't find anything under there related to stinit.def. The Linux installation guide suggests that you "...refer to the tape device manufacturer's requirements for

the specific device and model being used."

Was wondering if we should request that STK take these drives back and replace them with HP? My main concern is not being able to get the support for these drives in terms of the stinit.def entries, etc., but if there are other reasons

that we should NOT consider using IBM drives, I'd be curious to know.

STK didn't seem to know much about stinit.def and mentioned that it's not needed, but I'm doubtful on that.

If anyone is using IBM LTO drives with Linux, I'd be interested to know what your stinit.def file looks like and any help.

Thanks.

George

--

-- Yaron.

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