Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!killer!csccat!jack
From: jack@csccat.UUCP (Jack Hudler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: Pre-formatted tapes for HP drives
Message-ID: <2614@csccat.UUCP>
Date: 9 Dec 88 21:14:08 GMT
References: <1074@statware.UUCP> <26038@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> <9055@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: jack@csccat.UUCP (Jack Hudler)
Organization: Computer Support Corporation. Dallas,Texas
Lines: 35

In article <9055@bcsaic.UUCP> jsadler@bcsaic.UUCP (James Sadler) writes:
>Just another case of HP inventing their own standards.  After the last
		      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The "Tape Format" in question here was not dreamed up by
HP, if you want to blame someone then blame 3M. It's there idea
and HP just had the mis-fortune to use it. You have to understand
the times in which this decsion was made, remember that HP started
using cartridge tapes many years ago when tape technology in this
scale was still young (HP does like to try new things). Therefore
HP decided to use 3M formated tapes because they had much higher
quality control and because every tape was tested when formated
and still is. 

>  Out of the last four AXE and PE tapes we received 3,
>repeat 3 of the 4 have been bad.  Do you what its like to be part way

I have been working with HP equipment for 8 years and since we started
using cartridge tapes I have kept a box of the bad ones... I just looked
it, there are 7 bad tapes and all of them have been used to death. And
I have never had a bad tape from HP, I also wonder how often y'al clean
an aligned the cartridge tape drive. My library has 267 tapes in it, and
yes it's alot of money.

>through a upgrade and have the tape be bad ??!!  Since this involved an
>change from a 9000-520 to a 9000-350 we made a complete backup of the
>disk and then tar'ed the user files and other directories to seperate
>tapes.  The tape the the user files were on was bad at the 9th file.
>Thank goodness that the archive was good, but don't think we weren't
>wondering about it.  The last thing I'd get is a HP cartridge drive.
>Jim Sadler

I am not picking on you Jim, just this bad attitude about formated tapes.

					Jack Hudler
					Computer Support Corp.