[Info-vax] A VS DLT rant

[Rich Jordan]

I despise VS series DLT drives.

A couple years ago we purchased two new in box but old stock VS80s to
upgrade both VMScluster and wintel backup (from DAT).  All new tapes
(since the pile of DLT8000 tapes we had would require degaussing to
work on these drives).

One drive worked fine until now (unfortunately the one on the PC
side); the other drive self destructed after about 1 month of
operation (outside of the seller warranty, and since this was old
stock there was no HP warranty).  So we limped along with DAT backups
on the VMS side (which never failed).

Recently got a good (?) deal on a brand new rackmount unit with two
Quantum VS80 drives installed.  Same deal, 2 week seller warranty, no
Quantum warranty.  Since we still had a buttload of new tapes for this
format, and it sold for not much more than new cleaning tapes
(included) go for and we needed a cleaning tape anyway,  we bought
it.  Figure we'd start new with both drives, one PC, one cluster so
the working HP drive was pulled.  All old tapes were retired and we
started with fresh new ones.

31 days later, the drive on the PC side self destructed.  Ate a tape
(that had only been used twice before in the rotation, without
errors), broke and sucked the leader.  Same exact symptoms that the
first failed HP had.

Wondering if this is a design issue or if its simply the "Outsourced
production 50% failure rate in the first couple of months" QC/
Manufacturing issue.

So the HP drive goes back into the shiny new rackmount enclosure and
we hope it keeps working.  Hopefully next time we 'upgrade' backup we
can go to real DLT-type drives and not the 'value line'.  My DLT8000
at home (bought used, and using up all those used DLT4 tapes mentioned
above) is still going strong with no issues.

I hate VS tape drives.