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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
- Path: sparky!uunet!ferkel.ucsb.edu!taco!gatech!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!convex!convex!harper
- From: harper@convex.com (David Harper)
- Subject: Re: Colorado Jumbo 250MB Tape Streamer (8 Q's)
- Sender: usenet@news.eng.convex.com (news access account)
- Message-ID: <1992Nov8.162228.1246@news.eng.convex.com>
- Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 16:22:28 GMT
- Distribution: na
- References: <1992Nov2.125045.4086@cbfsb.cb.att.com> <mg.720955284@atomic> <1992Nov5.185630.21552@cbfsb.cb.att.com>
- Nntp-Posting-Host: rigel.convex.com
- Organization: Engineering, CONVEX Computer Corp., Richardson, Tx., USA
- X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
- Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
- not necessarily those of CONVEX.
- Lines: 29
-
- In article <1992Nov5.185630.21552@cbfsb.cb.att.com> feg@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (forrest.e.gehrke) writes:
-
- >CMS has announced a tape drive which works from the printer
- >port. This certainly as attraction from the point of view for
- >sharing the drive with more than one PC, just as one can do
- >with printers. BTW, the printer does not seem affected by
- >the tape drive.
-
- After months of being on backorder I finally got my CMS Trakker unit this
- past Friday (this is the parallel port version). I have spent most of the
- weekend evaluating the unit with somewhat mixed impressions. The software
- is okay (there's supposed to be a new version coming that also supports
- Windows), the hardware seems solid (it was easy to instal. and has given
- no hardware problems), but the performance is pitiful - I am seeing about
- 1.5 MB/min on a 25MHz 386 system. I bought this unit mostly for the claimed
- data rate of "up to 9.5 MB/min". I plan to contact CMS Monday morning to
- find out what's going on. One thing that will affect it is the performance
- of the parallel port (whether it's unidirectional, bidirectional or
- enhanced). Unfortunately, the software doesn't seem to recognize anything
- but unidirectional; so far I've loaded the software on 5 systems, some of
- which are supposed to have bidirectional ports. If there is any interest,
- I will follow up this post with a final review of this unit including any
- resolution (or lack thereof) on the problems.
-
- One bright side though - I bought 10 of the 2120 tapes from MEI (about $15
- each in lots of 5) and they look very good - no problems formatting at all.
- So far I have not had a single mention of anything being marked bad during
- the formatting process so either these are incredibly good tapes or the CMS
- software does not give any information
-