14 Feb
2003
14 Feb
'03
5:43 p.m.
On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Jim Arnott wrote:
A friend seems to have come into a pile of Exabyte
8505XL and tapes.
18gb IIRC. Supposedly for Suns, but perusing Exabyte's site shows that
they'll fit in just about everything except Mac. Any interest? Anyone
know what they might be worth?
<http://www.exabyte.com/support/online/documentation/hardware.cfm?id=109>
P-mail reply please. Judging from some of the other lists I'm on, the
moon seems to be in an intolerant to OT posts phase.
I'm not sure I'd call them completely OT. Just 7/14GB (uncompressed /
compressed) on an 8mm DAT tape. When they get old, they tend to drift
(helical scan heads) and may start producing tapes that won't be read by
other drives without re-alignment. They look to be the same capacity as
the Exabyte 8700, basically extended length "XL" 8500 drives. I've got an
8700 and an 8500 that came with a pile of first-generation RS/6000
hardware, and some more 8700s that came with a fairly new (by CCmp
standards) NCR refrigerator (worldmark 5100M).
Looking at Exabyte's docs, their technical doc was updated last in 1994 -
which means the drives may have been out in 1993, and probably are
on-topic.
Personally, if you want reliable backups, I'd stick with a DDS 4mm DAT
drive (which I have one of - and the tapes are cheap), a DLT drive (if you
can spend the dough on tapes), or optical media drive. Of course, some of
those _are_ off-topic.
Pat
--
Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www-rcd.cc.purdue.edu