Buying a DLT is never a bad idea, assuming you have a spare SCSI channel
for it. Aren't the new lower cost ones out now?

Also, DDS4 is supposed to be much more reliable, wish they 
would start shipping those standard.

You can also do things like use Image logging to be able to roll
forward from an old backup, assuming the image log files
are on a different user volume set.

Mirroring requires software or hardware and extra cost.


-----Original Message-----
From: Simonsen, Larry [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2001 6:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] tape drive error logs.


We were bit by a tape drive failure last week.  As a result of the change of
the tape drive, DAT in flavor,  a disc drive failed to spin up and we lost 1
days work of data.  At month end and quarter end this is quite expensive.
This has shed many questions as to the reliability of the hp 3000 system and
questions the use of 3000s at our facilities.  the new tape drive would not
read the old backup tapes and so the CE after replacing the disc drive
retrofitted the old tape drive back into the system so that a restore could
be done.  The hp engineer stated on site that the drives usually last only
18 months and this drive had been in the system for 30 months.  A few
questions come out of this experience.

1.      since predictive support tools do not reference the tape log files
is there a telesup utility which can to identify tape problems.
2.      should we regularly ( every year) change the DAT drive for a new
one?
3.      the restore after the system came up used the directory; create
option.  It appears that the posix directories do not have the correct
permissions on them. Is there a way to reset them?
4.      since these systems are 918 systems with 2 4GB disc drives which are
½ full what is the cost of adding a raid subsystem to these discs.  The
drives do not need to be hot swappable but just recoverable in the case of
failure.

Any suggestions for these type of small systems and reliability would be
very helpful.

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