Overview
The higher-performance 14GB 8mm Tape Drive from Sun is an enhanced 8mm digital helical-scan cartridge tape subsystem. The drive provides outstanding capacity, performance and reliability for important applications such as system and network backup/restore, data archival, data acquisition and data interchange.
The 14GB 8mm Tape Drive will accept the longer 160m XL (eXtended Length) tape and has an increased transfer rate of 1 MB/second.
The 14GB 8mm tape drive offers, on average, twice the transfer rate of the previous generation 14GB 8mm tape drive. It is ideal for workstation and workgroup server backup and archival applications on the full range of Ultra workstations and servers.
14GB 8mm Tape Drive
Sun's 14GB 8mm tape drive is an attractive alternative to existing devices for mid-range systems. It is an excellent choice as an entry-level backup/archive solution for departmental and workgroup servers.

Highlights of the Sun 14GB 8mm tape drive are:
1 MB/sec native data transfer rate, up to 2MB/sec in compression mode
7GB native capacity using 160-meter 8mm data grade media (14GB typical compressed capacity)
Built-in data compression increases native transfer rate and capacity specifications up to twice the native rate/size.
Half-height form factor
Robust, highly reliable, low-cost mechanism
Meets all domestic and international regulations for safety and emissions
Standard single-ended SCSI-2 interface with active termination
Like all Sun brand mass storage products, the 14GB 8mm tape drives have undergone rigorous drive development and reliability testing. Sun engineers have worked closely with the drive vendor to ensure the drives work optimally on Sun systems and perform reliably in the most demanding operating environments. Sun peripheral packaging is fully certified to meet all regulatory agency environmental specifications and all subsystem cabling is carefully matched to balance impedance for reliable SCSI signal quality.

Software Requirements
The 14GB 8mm Tape Drives are supported on Solaris 1.1.1 and 2.3 and later releases.
For performance reasons, it is recommended that no more than 2 tape drives be attached to any one SCSI bus that is also supporting other SCSI devices (disk drives) and that no more than 4 tape drives be attached to any one SCSI bus not supporting any other device.

System Requirements
The 14GB 8mm Tape Drives are supported on the following systems:
Table 1 Supported systems Sun Enterprse 2 Sun Enterprise 150 Sun Enterprise 3000 Sun Enterprise 4000
Netra i145 Netra i170E
Netra NFSTM 150

The 14GB 8mm Tape Drives work with the on-board SCSI host of the above mentioned systems as well as with the host adapters listed below:
Table 2 Supported SBus Host Adapter Cards SBus SCSI Host Adapter (SSHA)
SBus SCSI/Buffered Ethernet (SBE/S)
SBus Fast SCSI-2/Buffered Ethernet (FSBE/S)

Configurations
The 14GB 8mm Tape Drives come in the following configurations:
SunTM StorEdgeTM UniPack and SPARCstorage FlexiPack, for all systems listed above
Internal drive for the Sun Enterprise 2
Internal drive for the Sun Enterprise 3500 & Sun Enterprise 4500