24 Apr
2008
24 Apr
'08
12:30 p.m.
On Thursday 24 April 2008 15:07, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
Ebay, huh? Hmm.
Is there any easy way to tell for sure that's what kind of a drive it is?
Cool. Now all I need to do is get my hands on some tapes, and install one of
these into something or other with a SCSI card, which I need to have in a
box anyhow, so I can play with a RAID 5 array I want to build.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
--- "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at
verizon.net> wrote:
Does that mean I can just go for an 8mm tape?
There are two of them, and this was a part of a
whole IBM SSA system that
I've been dealing with bits of here. Pushing open the little door I see
something that sure looks like a helical-scan head, though somewhat
smaller than the one normally seen in a VCR.
Yup. That's an Exabyte. It's a helically scanned 8mm tape media, based
closely on video-8. I'm told
that these hold 20G on a tape. The guy I got 'em from
unfortunately doesn't have any tapes to go along with them.
Does anybody have any tapes that will work on these, or can any of you
guys point me toward where I could get a hold of some without getting into
crazy expense? I'd sure like to make some backups with one of these
units.
Depends on the drive. If the drive you have is really capable of holding 20
gigs of data, then it's going to be a "Mammoth" drive. The earlier drives
(8200, 8500, 8505, etc.) all used Metal Particle (MP) tape. This was pretty
much the same as 8mm video tape, and yes, you CAN use regular 8mm video tape
in these drives. It works fine, although some brands aren't as reliable. I
found that the Fuji tapes at my grocery store work just fine in the 8200
drives on my Prime computers.
The "Mammoth" drives, on the other hand, store more data by using a more
advanced type of tape. These are called AME tapes. (Advanced Metal
Evaporated, or something like that). You need to find some AME tape.
Shouldn't be too expensive on eBay, although I have never looked for any. Think I can
get 'em going under linux? :-)
You most definitely can. I have done it many times with 8200, 8500 and 8505
drives. Works just fine with normal *nix tape commands - tar, mt and the
like. I've even used an ancient 8200 drive with a commercial backup software
on a Macintosh, just for fun. It works fine.