Re: SCSI tape

[Michael Verne/VENTANA <Michael_Verne/VENTANA.ITP@lgate.vmedia.com>]

"...I have a Panasonic that came with a PCMCIA SCSI card. It has an ASPI 
driver thant allowd me to use another CD w/o a problem, but didn't hold 
up to the punishment a SCSI tape unit (HP) gave it. That could be a tape 
drive problem or an imperfect driver problem. (Does anyone know of any 
software that will test an ASPI driver for functionality?) I have not...."

~~~~~~~~~~

I don't know of an ASPI compatability test, but I've always been told to use 
the one that comes with the card, not the device.  Also, I got a tip the other 
day that may help you with the tape problem.  If your tape drive is SCSI I 
(which I believe all of them still are), and your card is SCSI II (which it 
must be or you wouldn't get the smaller connector), your card is probably set 
to 10Mb/s internal xfer rate, which SCSI I devices can't handle.  We were 
unwittingly doing this on one of our file servers, but by bumping the SCSI xfer 
rate down to 5Mb/s, the tape drive could handle the I/O flow & stopped 
crashing.  It was actually the tape drive that couldn't keep up with the card.  
Since 5Mb/s is faster than a CD rom can move data, you won't lose any performa
nce.

Michael J. Verne
michael_verne@vmedia.com
Systems Analyst, Ventana Communications Group, Inc.