[ale] [backups]

[Mike Kachline]

On Wed, 15 Apr 1998, Vernard Martin wrote:

> I'm looking into buying a backup device for my PC hardware. Looking for
> something in the 2 to 4 gig range. I don't care if its compressed or not.
> I would an IDE interface if possible as I have herad that there is some support
> for that now in the latest version of things like ftape. Any success stories
> would be greatly appreciated. I know that I could go scsi but I'm avoiding that
<snip>

	V,

	I've been using a Iomega Ditto Insider 3200. This drive uses the
1.6 / 3.2 TR-3 tapes, controlled via ftape (for quite some while).
Probably the best part of the ditto 3200 package is that it comes with a 2
Mb/s FDC in the box. I've seen a lot of complaining that the Iomega TR-4
drives were sold without the high speed FDC (aka, the "ditto dash"
controller).
	As far as problems with the drive? I've had no problems with the
drive other than finding an extra IRQ for the Ditto dash controller.
Unless things have gotten better with Ftape, from what I remember, ftape
didn't fully support the whole "shared IRQ" thing, allowing one to use the
same IRQ for the ditto dash *and* their on-board FDC.
	The "dash" by the way is nothing more than a 2mb/sec FDC, whereas
most IDE controllers usually come with a 1 mb/sec FDC. According to
Iomega, one *must* have some sort of high speed 2mb/sec controller in
order to use the drive in TR-3 mode (ie, 1.6 gigs per tape), otherwise,
Iomega's software at least, will only allow one to format and use tapes in
TR-2 mode (400 / 800). I honestly can't remember whether one needs
a high speed FDC for ftape, but, considering that I had us order one
for our colorado drive at GTMS, I suspect one does. Chips down, if you are
looking for an IDE drive, make damned sure you get a high speed FDC also.

	At motorsports, we've got a Linux box running a colorado TR-3
drive (can't remember the model), controlled by a ditto dash (which we had
to buy seperately). The colorado is *much* quieter than my Ditto insider,
but is also belt driven, whereas I am pretty sure that the insider is gear
driven, so, perhaps there are some tape drive wear considerations to be
taken?

	Also, a note about ftape. Due to many months of experience, I have
simply gotten into the habit of *not* using the "ftape" which comes with
the 2.0.x kernels, but instead, simply download the ftape dist, then use
ftape as a module. About a year or two ago, the ftape project got a new
owner, who was also the owner of the then split off "zftape" distribution.
Lots of effort went into re-unifying ftape and zftape, thus breaking the
hell out of the kernel's ftape code for quite some time. I haven't looked
into the 2.1.x kernels enough to determine whether or not the "newer"
ftape is in there, but, consider this just a note of warning. Somewhere in
the re-unification process, the ftape folks switched from using their own
little tape format to using the "official" QIC tape format. I honestly
don't know, and suspect that the kernel version of ftape still uses the
"old" tape format, so you will have to check on that too if you decide to
go the ftape route. I think the file format change happened somewhere
around the early 4.0 or late 3.x versions of ftape.


	One final word, unless someone else on this list knows of any
updates, none of the parallel port drives are supported under ftape. If
you really are interested in such drives, please look into this statement,
for, I neither have looked at ftape in quite a while, maybe this has
changed.

						- Mike
============================================================================
Michael Kachline - CS, Georgia Tech
kachline at cc.gatech.edu
http://brightstar.gt.ed.net/kachline/
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