24 Sep
2010
24 Sep
'10
6:47 a.m.
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?
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.
It's also kinda cool (for me) that DLT is a direct descendant of my
old favorite: the DEC TK-50. Yes, they're slow, finicky, and horribly
unreliable, but I have a lot of good memories from my later childhood
days hacking with TK-50s with my friends/mentors Ernie Perez, Bob Mader,
and Mike Santiago.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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.