I had the good fortune to recieve an Archive Python DDS2/DC DAT drive last
night. So I hooked it up to my Alpha to try it out. The drive appears
to be functioning. However, I got some timeouts from the ncr53c7,8xx driver
when trying to tar to or from the drive in multiuser mode. Things seemed to
behave better in single user mode. I've attached an excerpt from my
messages file at the end if someone more familiar with this output
can take a look. I haven't dug out my Symbios documentation to see
what things mean yet.
I'm running 1.3.57 on my Noname Alpha box. I've got the synchronous
options turned on in the driver and did not enable disconnects. I've
set the max transfer rate to 10 MHz and haven't seen any problems with
my disks (3 hard drives, 1 CD-ROM). The tape is seen at boot and
correctly (according to the manual I have) negotiates for 5 MB/sec
transfer rate.
Leaving disconnect/reconnect turned off is not a conservative behavior from the
perspective of a shared SCSI bus. Most likely your disk timeouts occurred
while the tape drive was engaged in an operation that took longer than 7
seconds but the tape could not disconnect and so the entire SCSI bus was locked
up for that time. Enable disconnect/reconnect and this problem will probably
go away.
Leonard