THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700





October 19, 2001

02 05 02 61 01101902



Mr. Charles Mnln
Customer Rep
chasm@boulderpost.exabyte.com
Technical Support
Description
Exabyte Corporation
1685 38th Street
Boulder, CO 80301
800 392 2983 fax or 800...

Subject:   Incident 279596 Performance Improvements Mammoth LT SE
Exabyte Letter October 19, 2001
Telecon Exabyte and Welch on Octobe 11, 2001
Delivery of inline terminator planned for October 23, 2001

Dear Charles,

Thanks for your letter this morning advising of a backorder for the terminator, and that delivery is expected on October 23, 2001, next Tuesday.

The purpose of the terminators is to operate the Exabyte Mammoth LT to design performance standards within a range from 200 MB/Min to 300 MB/Min.

There are several additional issues....

  1. In our call on October 11, 2001 you indicated Exabyte would submit a letter via email confirming the scope of adjustments required to enable our tape drive to perform according to specifications. Since the terminator is only one of several steps discussed, we need this letter to complete the record.

  2. Exabyte proposed sending a tape for installing updated Firmware. This was purchased on October 11, 2001 during our call. Has this been shipped, or is it being included with the terminator for delivery on October 23?

  3. Exabyte recommended downloading a driver from Microsoft for the Adaptec 19160. We notified Exabyte in the letter yesterday on October 18, 2001 that Microsoft has been contacted and there is no evident means to accomplish Exabyte's recommendation, as shown in the record for October 11, 2001. Exabyte should comment indicating other means for obtaining an updated driver, if this is still needed to meet Exabyte's performance specifications.

  4. The letter to Exabyte on October 18 reports discrepancies in the specification for the AMP 750381-1 terminator shown on page 8 of the Exabyte manual that is 1.4" wide, and the cable supplied by Exabyte for the Mammoth LT SE tape drive, which is 2.6" wide. We purchased additonal terminators for inventory, per recommendations of Carrie in your office, using the Exabyte specification. Since they don't fit, Exabyte should propose a remedy. Today, the vendor offers to exchange the incorrect terminators, however, this entails extra time and expense to effect this correction. We have incurred additional expense of approximately $1,500 due to investing 3 hours of extra effort on this matter. In fact, this mistake likely has consumed 40 hours going back to August 11, 2000 when the terminator issue first arose.

    We do not expect Exabyte to pay for additional expense at this time, but recommend a change in procedure to provide terminators required along with cables needed to properly install Exabyte equipment. This will mitigate the problem of sending the customer manuals that are out of date, as seems to have occurred in this case.

  5. Confirm Exabyte recommendations to modify Adaptec 19160 BIOS changing DTR from 160 to 10 and Wide Negotiation from Yes to No, as instructed on October 11, 2001.

Thanks.

Sincerely,

THE WELCH COMPANY



Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net