10 May
2007
10 May
'07
2:25 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Might be; I really don't know. I'm sure all rubber decays eventually - either
crumbling or turning to mush. It just seems to do it with *some* QIC drives
long before they've otherwise reached end of useful life, but it's not
something I've personally come across elsewhere. If the material is just
something "stock" then it would suggest that pretty much anything's prone to
the same goo problem.
Oh, and as someone (possibly it was you) said, these drives are slooooow! I'm
glad there's only two tapes...
cheers
Jules
On 9 May 2007 at 15:30, Jules Richardson wrote:
Aha... fair enough. As someone else mentioned, it does turn out to be an
Exabyte 8500 drive internally, just with a TTi SCSI interface at the back
which hooks both to the drive and the front-panel electronics.
Unfortunately it didn't want to accept the cleaning tape (just spat it
straight back out again) - I was worried there was a fault with the tape
transport, but it's accepted one of the 8mm cartridges just fine.
This first tape at least is in tar format, and is happily extracting via a
Linux box as I speak (type). Too early to say whether the contents are
actually anything interesting yet, though. (Lots of source code so far,
including odds and ends for the Natsemi 32xxx family, so I'm hopeful it's not
just a backup of some secretary's desktop!)
Any recollection as to what sort of bugs? I
don't need it to write any data,
but I would rather it faithfully reproduced the data on the tapes* (rather
than giving junk whilst appearing to work)
My recollection is that there were numerous firmware bugs. We'd
received the drive as a sample in order in hope that we'd endorse it
as a drive to work with our software. It didn't work as expected,
TTi fessed up to some firmware problems and we told them to get in
touch with us when they got things ironed out and sent the drive
back. I've only
ever seen it on QIC drives, to be honest, not other tape transport
technologies. Is it definitely an age-related thing (i.e. it'll hit *all*
drives eventually, rather than being something related to the specific type of
rubber used on the QIC drives)?
Isn't most of the rubber used in QIC drives just neoprene?