On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Allen Briggs wrote:

> > I'm debating the purchase of a DDS-2 drive, looking at a model from APS.
> > (Need a better backup solution).  It looks like this would be supported
> > under NetBSD (supports most SCSI devices).  Am I going to be lucky enough
> > to kill two birds with one stone?  Any 'problem' DDS mechanisms to be aware
> > of?
> 
> It's not a DDS-2, but I've been happy with my Exabyte 8700LT 8mm drive
> (running on a NetBSD/i386 machine).  I've found the 120m tapes for about
> $4ea (Maxell from Buycomp, LLC).  I don't know what your drive and media
> costs are for the DDS-2 drive, but do factor in the media.  A friend of
> mine inherited a couple of Sun tape drives that are really nifty, but
> the data cartridges are over $100 each (for 2 or 4 GB).  I think Dirt
> Cheap Drives also deals with Macintosh systems.
> 
> I don't foresee any problems with any DDS-2 drive under NetBSD, although
> the mac SCSI drivers haven't seen tapes too much...  I haven't seen any
> DDS-2 tape drives, myself, so I can't tell you anything about them.
> Sorry.

Just to add another data point:

I've been happily using a HyperDAT from APS w/ NetBSD/mac68k 1.3.2 for a
few months. The tapes I'm using (4mm x {90,120}m) are DDS-2 so I guess the
drive is too ;-). I think the tapes are something like $10 (in Sweden).

The only problem I've had was that tapes recorded on an identical drive on
a Sun w/ Solaris 2.6 didn't make sense to NetBSD. Solaris did grok the
NetBSD tapes however. I groveled over the man pages to see if there were
any incompatibilities between Sun's tar and gtar (default blocksize etc.)
but eventually gave up.

/Johan