Exabytes and Retries

[Don Sharp]

Our experience of Exabytes is via the one attached to our Solbourne, but
those people suffering with excessive retries may benefit from our
experience.

Exabyte No 1: Developed an inability to write multiple tape marks.

Exabyte No 2: Reported 6->30K errors during overnight dumping. Cleaning the
	      heads had no effect, and the problems occurred from the very
	      beginning. We always managed to restore from the tapes though,
	      to our very great relief in one situation!

Exabyte No 3: Works like a charm, touch wood!

Note that the SAME tapes were in use during most of this palaver. Early on
we suspected the tapes, but fresh batches yielded the same results.  My
personal suspicion is that the write current settings for the heads are
critical and that transit effects or inadequate QA are responsible.

| Don Sharp                                 Don.Sharp at mari.co.uk       |