Exabyte 8mm cartridge info needed

[Rahul Dhesi]

I'm looking at using an Exabyte 8 mm 2.3 gigabyte cartridge drive with
a VAX-11/785 running 4.3BSD, using a controller that will handle both
UNIBUS disk drives and the Exabyte cartridge drive.  (I don't have the
controller's model number as I write this but it's made by CMD
technology and if you have used it you will probably recognize it
immediately.)

Questions:  

1.   Is it possible to make dump under 4.3BSD work fast enough to feed
data to the Exabyte at a rate that will actually let it store 2.3
gigabytes or near that?  I understand that this is a streaming
cartridge drive and under stop-and-go operation the capacity of these
cartridge drives goes way down.

2.   If not, how realistic is it to simply do
"dd bs=something if=/dev/{rawdisk} of=/dev/{cartridge}" to make image
backups?  Can this work at all?

3.   Has anybody tried this combination at all, and if so, how did it
work for you?  In particular, would 3 CDC WREN VI drives (649 megs
each) and one Exabyte cartridge on one controller perform reasonably
well on the same controller (and same UNIBUS)?

4.   Will 8mm video cartridges from our local department stores work
acceptably, or do we need to buy cartridges specially certified for
data?

If you answer, your telephone number will greatly help (if you don't
mind), as I need this information as fast as possible and would like to
call you if I have more questions.  Thanks.

Follow up to comp.periphs only, please.

I will post a summary of responses only if enough people request it,
since this seems to be a narrow topic.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
                    ARPA:  bsu-cs!dhesi at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu