HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
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 an 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.
SCSI support for the HP7980S/SX is available on MPE/iX Release 4.0 with
the installation of several patches. Contact your Hewlett-Packard
representative for more information.
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-inch 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.