T600, does it support the DLT 8000

[daniel smith_3]

Does a T600 support the DLT8000? I cant seem to find any documentation on this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Dan

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

If you can find a DLT8000 that is either single-ended or FWD (Fast-Wide Differential / HVD) SCSI then yes it should work.

However, you will probably NOT be able to stream data to that drive fast enough to fully utilize the speed the DLT8000 offers.

FWD SCSI maxes out at 20MB/second. I forget what the speed of the DLT8000 is but it is much greater than 20MB/sec.

Single-ended SCSI is even slower.

[Joshua Scott]

The DLT8000 can have a Fast-Wide interface. The Specs say 6MB/sec native, 12MB/sec compressed (assuming 2:1 compression). The burst transfer rate is 12MB/sec async, and 20MB/sec syncronous.

I'm not sure if you can buy an HP DLT8000 new anymore, but they are available used. The part number you probably want is a C6379A - fits in a 'SMART' enclosure (C4318ASZ)

Josh

[TwoProc]

They worked on K's and D's - which are the smaller versions of the same family of systems - so I would really have to believe that they wouldn't work.
Patrick's right though- you're not going to be able to stream to those ( we never were able to) without some good backup software which is going to buffer up a lot of stuff for you - like Omniback(Data Protector), Tivoli, etc.

[TwoProc]

Dan, I just reread the above message that I posted. Boy, did I type that badly! I meant that "I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't work" - not what I said!!! (embarrasing, no?)

Dan - this drive will work just fine for you.

Just make sure that it's on it's own SCSI card - or - the card is not in use for anything else (at the least) during the backup. This is b/c HP considers this a "noisy" (that's what they told me) drive on the SCSI bus, and if the tape drive is active - it will drown out just about anything else on the bus trying to do serious work.

[Bill Hassell]

The problem with DLT drives, especially the high end 8000 is that it requires a constant stream of data at a rate that the T600 just can't supply. So the tape drive will run at approximately 1/10 to 1/30 of normal speed and will wear out (fail) very quickly due to all the repositioning required for slow data streams.

You may need a tape drive that will hold 40-80Gb but there aren't any that are slow enough. So you'll have to buy some DDS-3 drives (DDS-4's are too fast) and run them in parallel. Commercial backup software such as HP's Data Protector can stream data to both drives and keep running at full speed. DDS-3's are quite inexpensive but get a spare.