It has been my experience that predictive support works relatively well
for 79xx drives, but I don't think I've ever seen it report a problem with
anything since.  I've lost 793x (Eagle) drives on a whim with no prelude,
but have never had any problems with C2203 drives (as best as I recall).
No problems with C3024T's either (after installation -- one came from the
factory with one of the internal drives mis-cabled or mis-jumpered, I forget
which) but we've only had them about a year.
 
I'm hoping for good reliability with the new drives but your story concerns
me.  I would hope that the SCSI gear is more reliable than HP-IB.
 
One side note... I installed a DAT drive on our production system a couple of
weeks ago, the newer 2-8Gb hardware-compression drives.  The first full backup
took two tapes and six hours.  Next time I ran DEVCTRL(DEVCNTL?).MPEXL.TELESUP
to specifically enable compression, and included MAXTAPEBUF on the :STORE
command.  One tape, < 2.5 hours (approximate).  In contrast, using parallel
6250-bpi tape drives (two) we were running about 3 hours and 24 reels.
 
[\] Jeff Kell, [log in to unmask]