sigh. i'm too far away. seems to be a nice gadget. anyone wants to get
rid of a 9track drive in austria/southern germany? i'd happily give
the drive a nice, warm and dry home.
--
Wolfgang Eichberger - OE5EWL
Operating System Collector
Blog:
I've got what I'm fairly sure is some model of
M4-Data 9-track drive in a
"desktop" enclosure, relabeled as an "Interface Data, Inc." drive.
?It's
similar, but not identical, to the 9914 for which there is documentation on
Bitsavers. ?It appears to do 1600 and 3200 BPI (not sure what encodings.)
?It has a Differential SCSI interface option, along with a Pertec interface.
?It's labeled on the back as "Model No. 9946."
I have some pictures I took when I first got it (it hasn't changed much
since then) at:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/9-track/
The tape transport seems to be working fine (it loads and unloads, moves to
BOT and rewinds just as I'd expect. ?The auto-loading procedure on these
drives always seems magical to me...) but there's something wrong with the
digital side of things. ?I've made a few attempts over the past couple of
years to use the Pertec interface (with the Diff SCSI interface removed) but
all reads result in parity errors. ?It may just be a configuration issue --
there are tons of configurable settings via the front panel -- but I lack
the documentation to know what they are (they are not the same as the 9914's
as far as I can tell) or to do any other testing.
Picked this up almost three years ago (time flies!) and it's just been
taking up space. ?Time to get it out of here. ?Anyone want it? ?It's free!
?Pickup only in the Seattle area. ?And if anyone in the Seattle area has a
Pertec-interface 9-track drive they want to part with, let me know :).
- Josh