8mm data cartridges

On 8 May 2007 at 5:32, Jules Richardson wrote: I've got a few of the Exabyte drives. The late-model cost-reduced drives (top loading) are miserably unreliable. The standard front- loaders were far better constructed. Many shipped in their own boxes with LCD display that would indicate status, number of bytes remaining on the tape, etc. 8 mm wasn't bad. At about that time, we were heavily involved in specifying tape for customers and we tended to rank things this way: DLT > 8mm > 4mm DAT > Travan > QIC. 8mm, like DAT and DLT is an immediate-verify (read after write) technology and isn't bad for the time. There was the same business about confusing 8mm video carts with 8mm data carts as there was with 4 mm DAT audio with 4 mm data. Manufacturers said not to substitute, but a lot of individuals did. All of the 8mm gear that I saw was SCSI. It might be that some manufacturers put together specialized boxes as they did with 4mm (Valitek is one name that comes to mind) to allow for printer-port transfers also. I used to have an ISA card that one hooked up to a VHS recorder to do backups. It was incredibly slow and unreliable. Even in 1991, it was getting to be obvious that the era of tape backup was doomed, with hard disk storage capacities growing like Topsy and tape lagging more an more--although I still use DLT occasionally. Cheers, Chuck