[Info-vax] TK50 - this is annoying...

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-10-08 20:31, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <k4uvrv$ds6$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
> 	kludge at panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
>> On 2012-10-08 13:28, "Roßert G. Schaffrath" wrote:
>>>
>>> As bad as TK50's were, they were a definite improvement over the TU58. I
>>> recall much lost time waiting for an 11/730 bootstrapping microcode from
>>> one of those.
>>
>> I completely disagree.  The TU58 was slow as molasses (what can you expect
>> from a glorified serial port?) but it never tore a leader, it never jammed,
>> it never shredded a tape and lost a critical dataset.
>>
>> The TK50 was flaky and unreliable.  Not as flaky and unreliable as Exabytes,
>> but amazingly prone to complete data loss.  If you cared about your data
>> you needed to save it on two or three tapes.  Of course, when the leader
>> hook on the drive tore off, it didn't matter anyway.
>
> That's funny.  I still use TK50's and seldom have problems beyond needing
> to clean the heads.
>
>>
>> Amazingly enough, the modern DLT and SDLT drives are pretty reliable.  I
>> have never seen one jam and shred a tape, although I have seen plenty of
>> them lose the leader hook.
>
> Yeah, I have some of them, too.  I hav e never tried it, but it might be
> fun to put one on a PDP-11 and do a full backup and restore just to see
> how fast it can really be done.  :-)

I do that to DDS-3. Most of the time is spent by the 11/93 just sucking 
data in, and writing it out again. It cannot keep the tape busy enough.

(Nice to have all the full backups, plus all the incremental backups on 
the same tape...)

	Johnny