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Compatibility with the Floppy Drive
Because the tape drive attaches to either a SCSI or IDE cable instead of the
floppy ribbon cable and does not use DMA channel 2, there is no
contention with the floppy drive.
Installation Flexibility
The tape drives install in either a 5.25-inch or 3.5-inch bay inside the Store
Controller.
Note: Because the TR-4 EIDE tape drive uses EIDE, it works with systems
that do not have a SCSI card.
Reliability
The Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is an impressive 200,000 hours.
Reliability should be improved from previous tape drives because the ECC
can recover up to 6 bad segments per block instead of the 3 bad segments
per block.
Support
The following table shows the systems that support the TR-4 tape drive.
Description Machine Type
PC 300 6571*, 6573, 6581*, 6583, 6577, 6587, 6589
PC 700 6875, 6877, 6885, 6887
Notes:
1. The systems marked with an asterisk (*) cannot support the SCSI tape drive because
they have no PCI slot.
2. For the SCSI tape drives, a SCSI host adapter is required if one is not already in the
system.
The operating system does not support the TR-4 EIDE tape drive on IBM PS/2
(Microchannel) systems or IBM servers. However, the TR-4 SCSI tape drive is
supported on the following IBM servers:
v PC Servers 310
v PC Servers 315
v PC Servers 325
v PC Servers 330
There may be additional desktop systems that support the tape drive that were not
available at the time of this publication. In order for the tape drive to be supported
on a system unit, all of the following conditions must be met:
v The tape drive is supported by the PC Company on a particular system. Contact
the PC Company to determine if a particular system supports the TR-4 tape
drive.
v The system is supported by the operating system. To view a list of systems
supported by the operating system, see the Internet web address:
http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/rds/storesys/4690/contmatx.htm.
The IBM 4690 Store System software does not support the formatting of a tape
cartridge. The tapes must be preformatted.
2 TR-4 Tape Drive User’s Guide