Subject: HP 1533A DAT drive & Compression
To: Current-Users@Netbsd. Org <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Bill Dorsey <dorsey@lila.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/01/2000 00:10:23
Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has successfully used an HP 1533A
DAT drive with compression turned on.  I've filled a 4 gig
tape 5 times today and every time NetBSD reports the tape is
full at the 4 gig point.  I'm using a 4-gig native capacity
DDS-2 tape (should give up to 8 gig compressed capacity).
I'd hope to get better than 1:1 compression on my ufs filesystem.

I tried setting the DIP switches on the HP drive to force
compression on.  I tried various recommended switch settings
from HPs web site (which contains very spotty information on
this drive -- shame on HP) for various operating systems
including Sun 4.x, SGI, generic PC, and DEC.  I also tried
messing with the NetBSD mt command.  If I have the compression
hard-wired on, mt compress 1 fails, but mt compress 0 succeeds.
If I have the switches set to allow the computer to select
compression, then mt compress 1 succeeds.  When I do an mt
status after the mt compress, it always comes back with the
same thing (and reports the density is 36 -- DDS-2).

If anyone has any suggestions for other things to try, I'd love
to hear about them.  It would be nice if there were a simple
way to determine whether compression was working or not without
filling a tape (I will use 1.3 gig tapes from now in in my
experiments until I get this working).

BTW, the hardware is a DEC PWS 433a (Alpha) running NetBSD 1.4Y.

--
Bill Dorsey      "The unarmed man is not just defenseless --
dorsey@lila.com   he is also contemptible."  Machiavelli