The FreeBSD Diary

The tape drive in my Digital DLT MiniLibrary (Model DS-TL891-NE) has died. Not totally dead. It just doesn't respond to the library. It ends up with three flashing lights (Write Protected, Tape In Use, and Use Cleaning Tape) and the system can't load a tape. Fortunately, I have more spare tape drives than I can use.

Some time ago, I moved to disk based backups, with the plan to copy those backups to tape as well.

When replacing one drive with another, you need to make sure they are both of similar types. In this case, they both need to be SCSI DIFF drives.

The original drive:

The replacement drive:

The key points:

1. Both are model TZ89N-AV
2. Both are SCSI-DIFF
3. Both have the same SCSI symbol (the graphic between SCSI and DIFF)