24 Sep
2010
24 Sep
'10
8:22 a.m.
On Fri, 24 Sep 2010, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 9/23/10 5:57 PM, Steven Hirsch wrote:
And, I don't want to dump cold water on anyone's backup plans, but I've
found the 8mm DAT drives are by far the least reliable of any tape
system ever used here. Not necessarily in terms of data integrity, but
in terms of the _&)(*^^ drive itself dropping dead or developing problems.
Probably threw a half dozen of them away in the past ten years. I have
two working that I keep around only for laughs and data recovery.
There is no 8mm DAT. Do you mean 8mm Exabyte or 4mm DAT?
Slip of the brain... 8mm Exabyte, of course.
Interestingly enough, I never had much trouble at all with the 4mm drives.
Go figure. Haven't used any of the rotary head drives much since getting
my first DLT in 2005 or so.
I've added a scsi tape drive to my collection. I
hope to use
it with my Sparcbook. It is a Sun box with a sticker on it saying
that it is a EXB-8500C drive. Do I need special 8mm tapes
with it? How do I know what tapes will work with it?
I've never dealt with these drives before.
The 8200 (2.3GB) could use standard video tapes, but the 8500 (5GB)
requires data tapes. I tried video tapes in the 8500 when it came out,
but the error rates were horrendous. Not that it makes much difference, as one is just
about as bad as the
other. I will never go near helical-scan media again. Give me DLT, SDLT,
and LTO and I'll be happy.
We violently agree on that point... I used DLT7000 drives for a few years
until I grew tired of changing tapes every 1/2 hour. Currently quite
happy with the LTO-2 units. The eBay price-point is just right and I was
able to pickup a plastic storage-bin full of tapes for $20 at a flea
market. The tapes track usage and none of them were anywhere near the
point where I'd worry about data integrity.
Steve
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