30 Apr
2015
30 Apr
'15
3:40 p.m.
On 4/30/15 3:26 PM, Ian Finder wrote:
Sorry to hijack but would love if any experts on these
drives pop up!
Both drives have essentially the same underpowered reel motors. It wouldn't
surprise me if the motor bearings have dried out. I must have a dozen of the
things, and I've never gotten any of them to work reliably. They are direct
drive with speed control determined by a disc encoder in the tape path and
are VERY slow to change direction.
The 34xx series was better, but not great.
The other thing I noticed was the internal Pertec-SCSI converter board would
sometimes hang. There were two different generations of them, I see I never
bothered to upload the firmware to bitsavers from them.