HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Chapter 6 Peripherals Introducing HP7980S and HP7980SX SCSI Tape Drive Support by Lori Orvek and Jonathan Sauer Commercial Systems Division Product Overview The HP7980S and HP7980SX SCSI magnetic tape drives are now supported on all hardware platforms of the HP 3000 Series 900. These drives are similar to the HP7980 and the HP7980XC but use a SCSI rather than an HP-IB interface. The 7980S and 7980SX are fully supported with all Hewlett-Packard supported tape applications including STORE, TurboSTORE/iX, FCOPY, User Logging, and file system intrinsics. An upgrade kit is available to convert your existing HP-IB devices to SCSI. This upgrade kit allows you to take advantage of the SCSI interface without a big investment. Contact your Hewlett-Packard sales representative for more information.
\ \ \ Important Details \ Please Read SCSI support for the HP7980S/SX is available on MPE/iX Release 4.0 with the installation of the following patches that need to be qualified on your system: Patch IDs -------- MPEFXB4A MPEFXP2A MPEFXU4A ODIFXQ1A ODIFXQ2A OFDFXN3A
The SCSI interface used by these devices provides significant benefits: * High bus capacity The SCSI bus provides more than three times the bandwidth of the HP-IB bus. While this will not improve the performance of the device itself, it does mean that more devices can be kept streaming on the bus. * Long cable length The SCSI Extender can be used on the SCSI bus to extend its length up to 100 meters. * 7980SX performance improvement The 7980SX comes with a larger data buffer than the 7980XC, which provides faster performance. Together these two drives provide customers with the advantages of the SCSI interface without the limitations of the HP-IB interface, additional flexibility in configuration and protection in current 1/2" tape investment. Please refer to the related article in the "Technical Articles" chapter of this Communicator for more details on the differences between SCSI and HP-IB drives.