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From: olson@anchor.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: 8MM Drives
Message-ID: <5331@odin.SGI.COM>
Date: 16 Mar 90 02:22:49 GMT
References: <1290@nems.dt.navy.mil>
Sender: news@odin.SGI.COM
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In article <1290@nems.dt.navy.mil> mhart@dtoa1.dt.navy.mil (hart) writes:

>Is it true that Exabyte is the sole source for 8MM transports in North
>America, regardless of the vendor name on the box??

YES.

>If the above is true, there should be little if any compatibility problems;
>right????

NO.  Exabyte produces different proms for different vendors, for assorted
reasons.  Some will work with our system, some won't.  Also, because the
same driver is used for all SCSI tape drives, we key off of the vendor name
(and where appropriate) product name to decide what kind of special things
we can/may do with the drive.  Some of the special proms return different
inquiry strings, so we may not recognize a drive from a third party vendor.

>In a related matter, we took an Archive 150MB QIC drive from MaxStream
>for the Mac (Identical in all observable ways to the SGI external 150MB
>tape from Archive), hooked it up to a PI, and, while it kinda worked,
>it was certainly not reliable enough to use for anything valuable.
>Any ideas on why this is/was???

For the same reason an Exabyte might not work.  The Mac doesn't quite
implement the SCSI standard 'correctly', and the vendors often make
special proms, and even sometimes PC board changes, when selling
into the MAC market.

One of the reasons we charge more than third party vendors for our
peripherals is that we end up doing a fair amount of testing and
working with vendors to try to ensure that the periphals do, in fact,
work with our systems, both at the hardware and software level.

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.