Colorado Mag Tape driver for SYSV/386

[Mark J. DeFilippis]

In article <6863 at cps3xx.UUCP>, usenet at cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner) writes:
> From article <10622 at ttidca.TTI.COM>, by goroff at kashmir.TTI.COM (Marc Goroff):
> $ I am thinking about using a Colorado Memory Systems 40Mbyte tape drive
> $ as a cheap ($240) backup device for my 386 SysV box at home. It is an
> $ internal drive that sits on a floppy disk controller. CMS claims
> $ to have a driver for Xenix, but not Unix. Does anybody have a driver for
> $ this unit under SysV, or perhaps source code to the Xenix driver??

Just a note.  We have 6 - 8 of these drives at various locations/clients.
The first drivers we got were ver 2.02.  Problem... The kernel paniced
and crashed abruptly.  The tapes would write fine, but when you read them
back, they crash with an error 12.  The manual states this is related to
the Reed-Solomon ECC.  In any case, a few months ago I called yelling
about the problem.  It existed on 4 different manufacturer's 386 boards,
two flavors of Xenix, and 3 versions of xenix.  All exhibit the same
problem.

Roger Arnold, the head of tech support sent me drivers 2.07 to fix the problem
after they finally admited they had a problem.  Well, over a year later and
it still crashes 70% of the time.  The manual states with the advanced
Reed-Solomon ECC that the chance of error is 1 in 300000 tapes.  We find the
chance of crash to be 3 out of 5 tapes on all of these machines.

Ironic that we got these JUMBO drives after we thought the crash problem
with the now extinct XR4 drives they used to make was due to hardware problems.
So... After almost 3 years, their drivers are still buggy.  You think they
would hire a guy that knows how to write device drivers.  In the past,
I had requested from now ex-employee Steve Macklyn all the device info
so we could write our own drivers, but they said they had a bad experience
with that once before and would not provide me with the info.

Several people/clients we deal with have finally realized that cheap backup
that works 30% of the time is no backup at all and I have switched them to
Archive 150 meg drives which work on the SCO supplied drivers, thus
eliminating the need for a third party driver.

It is a shame because we are talking major DC2000 tape investment all down
the tubes.  Of the clients that are replacing the drives, they are dumping
a $250 drive, but over $800 -$1000 in tapes.  Thats the cost of the Archive
drive!  I also note here that we have never had a drive fail due to hardware.
So if they ever hire a decent guy to write the drivers, they will make a lot
of people happy.

-- 
Mark J. DeFilippis
SA @ Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11530                   (516) 663-1170
UUCP:	 philabs!sbcs!bnlux0!adelphi!markd