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Exactly my story. Dell replaced it once but it will only back
up to one tape. The other tape has been replaced twice. I
gave up and got a CD-RW from HP naturally.
Jimmy
-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Fritz [mailto:fritz@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 11:25 AM
To: Omega-List
Subject: Re: OFF Topic Tape Backup
> I phoned HP technical support and they were absolutely first class
> in walking me through the SCSI settings. I now have a functioning
> tape unit within 24 (ish) hours of the failure. Michael Dell should
> take note.
> I'm so impressed with their service I thought I'd pass it on in
> case anyone else is making a purchasing decision.
I wish I could say the same for my HP tape unit, a "Colorado 8GB"
Travan 4 drive.
I worked for HP for 13 years (& 6 more as a consultant, and my wife
still does), and the HP Colorado units are produced about 15 miles
from my house. So I wanted to go with a company I knew. I assumed
an HP drive and HP support would live up to HP's long reputation for
quality.
Boy was I wrong. This tape drive has been a fussy PITA ever since I
got it. It took a lot of fooling around and MANY calls to HP support
to even get the thing working at first. I knew I had a problem when
successive calls to support frequently resulted in TOTALLY different
answers for the same problem. Some of which were, in my opinion,
utterly bogus.
I eventually got it working, and most of the time it works OK. But
every once in a while it will fail for no apparent reason. Backups
will fail or lock up, and it will issue error messages that basically
claim the configuration is broken and can't possibly work. Try it
again and it'll usually work just fine.
The backup software is also terribly unreliable. It hangs on a
regular basis. It's the *ONLY* piece of software I have (out of many
dozens of applications) that's capable of messing up NT so badly that
I have to reboot.
It works just well enough that I haven't bothered to pitch it and
replace it with something reliable. Probably one of these days I'll
regret that.
I'm sorry to have to report this about my "alma mater," but not all
HP tape drives are as reliable as you'd like. Caveat emptor.
Gary
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