Tape Drive Suggestion? (Summary)

[Stephen Wong]

In article <1861 at engage.enet.dec.com> I wrote:

>I am considering to buy a tape drive for my PC.  The budget should be within
>US$400.  The tape should be usable both in MS-DOS and SCO Unix environment.  I
>found Colorado tape drive to be my choice.  But there is one drawback, it will
>occupy a floppy connector, ie. I cannot have 5.25", 3.5" and tape drive at
>once.  However, there is an additional card to allow user to connect two
>floppy drives and tape.
>
>Does anyone have experience with Colorado tape drive?

Up till now, I have received 16 replies answering my question, I would like to
express my thanks to the following people :-

mehtash at clutx.clarkson.edu 			"Amanda Sutton"
poffen at sj.ate.slb.com 
malloy at nprdc.navy.mil 				"Sean Malloy"
pjd at hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu 			"Peter J. Dotzauer"
segpc!seg at vicom.com
beareq!fx4!thieb at ai.mit.edu 			"Thieb"
boulder!iscden!jbev at boulder.Colorado.EDU
cgordon at vpnet.chi.il.us 			"Gordon Hlavenka"
carlg at rosevax.rosemount.com 			"Carl Gansen"
jpd at pc.usl.edu 					"Dugal James P."

The following is summary of replies :-

Colorado Mountain System (CMS) Tape Drive
=========================================
It is a tape drive for connection with a floppy controller, from replies, it is
almost the cheapest (US$240 - US$270) floppy tape drive.  CMS tape is good for
MS-DOS system, a software which can compress data, backup multiple partitions,
span a disk partition across several tapes, is provided.  However, this tape
drive is very sensitive to CPU timing, raw tapes require formatting (something
1 hour for a 40 megabytes tape) and most importantly very slow.

If you connect the tape drive to the second floopy connector, you should set up
the CMOS (for PC/AT only) indicating no floopy drive on the second connector. 
You may also purchasing a seperate card for CMS tape drive which has the price
in the range (US$85 - US$100).  If the firmware of the tape drive is rev. 40 of
later, you may purchase a special cable called CK-17, which can daisy chain two
floppy drives and a tape drive.

For SCO Unix, CMS tape drive uses QIC-40 standard, which is supported by SCO
Unix and ODT, however the performance is very poor.  Users should use the tape
in single user mode in order to minimize the timing problem and overhead of the
OS, therefore, in Unix, if there is a 120MB partition, the system should be
shut down for 6 hours (including formatting of 3 tape and backup time)!!  I
think it is quite unacceptable for a normal system.

Other Brand
===========

There are several other brands of tape drive in the price range of US$300 -
US$400, the following 2 brands are discussed in replies

Wangtek 5099EK

It is a 60MB tape drive.  It uses DC-600 tape and the capacity is 60MB.  It
comes with a controller card and a software for backup in MS-DOS.  The maximum
transfer speed is 5Mbit/min.  Wangtek is supported in SCO Unix and the driver
is quite good.  There is a 150MB model called 5150PK.  I have decided to order
a Wangtek tape drive instead of a CMS one.

Archive FT-60

It is a 60MB tape drive also, the specification is similar to Wangtek, but the
price is higher.  Archive is also supported in SCO Unix.