9-Track 1/2" Tape Drive Recommendations?

On 8/21/15 7:22 PM, Jon Elson wrote: One of the things I've specialized in is collecting tape drive manuals on bitsavers. There are docs there for most drives. In the bad old days, you would buy a formatter box that connected to the read/write/control cable interface. Kennedy, Pertec, and most other vendors made them. Or you could get unformatted controlers from Emulex, Western Peripherals and others that could take the three cable interface and connect it directly to your Nova, PDP-11 or Interdata. Eventually, the dual 50 pin formatted interface took over as the formatters got small enough that they could be integrated into the drives. The other big difference in later drives is if they were 'streaming' or not. What that means is the tape is expected to roll continously (stream) as opposed to being able to quickly stop between records. Being able to do this is the reason older drives have tension arms or vacuum columns. Doing away with needing to stop quickly makes the drives cheaper to build. The low-cost drives (like the Qualstar 105x) just have two reel motors and a tachometer on a capstan to sense tape speed. The motors also don't have much torque compared to the servo motors of the old drives, which can be an issue if there is much shed coming off the tape. The 105x series also can only really handle 1600bpi tapes. They cheat for 3200bpi by slowing the tape down to half-speed. HP 88780s are nice front loading drives that can be found with 800/1600/6250 and Pertec or SCSI interfaces. Another one I've used is the Kennedy 9610, the M4/Storagetek 9614, and the later model Qualstars. Each has their quirks especially when dealing with poor condition tape. I have a couple of Fuji 24xx series, but never made any use of them since I don't normally use anything that just has a formatted Pertec interface. It all depends on how much use you are really going to make of it, and the condition of your media. A low-end Qualstar would be OK for light duty use.