24 Aug
2005
24 Aug
'05
5:56 p.m.
The 4mm tapes are about 12-13 years old and the
8mm 8-13 years old.
[...]we do have DDS3 and maybe DDS4 drives [...]
DDS drives do a very good job of reading older lower-density 4mm tapes. And DDS drives seem to be pretty durable.
The drives that we are planning on using are basically brand new and coming
out of RS/6000 servers that are going out of service.
I do have a fairly large collection of drives of unknown condition here, but
then I also have been collecting tapes to test them with :^)
There were a couple of oddball 8mm formats for digital
data very early
on but it's very unlikely you've got tapes in those odd formats. What
you have will probably be readable in an Exabyte 8200 (should you find
a working one!) or 8500/8505/8505XL (far more reliable). An AIT
drive (also uses 8mm-style cartridges) may or may not be backwards
compatible with the earlier Exabyte formats, I'm not too up on the
details.
I'm possitive they're not 8200, though I think I *might* have some working
8200 drives. I'd thought they were 8500, but is it possible to get close to
10GB on an 8500 even with compression? (a lot of the tapes are labeled with
the disk name/size)
If the tapes are intended for digital data storage
they'll generally
be better than videotapes pressed into digital use, at least for 8mm.
I never was able to tell the difference between "computer" and
"audio"
4mm tapes in everyday use.
They're either genuine Exabyte or Sony from what I've seen, I would hope
that none were videotapes.
BTW, due to the nature of audio DAT tapes, I wonder if there is a
difference.
As long as you don't have to write, only read, I
think the Exabyte 85xx
series can read the 8200 density stuff OK. There are 85xx variants
with compression and variants without compression, and they
don't necessarily switch transparently from one mode to the other
(caused much confusion for me 15 years ago!).
IIRC, the 85xx series can read 8200 tapes, but it's been years since I
touched an 8mm drive, or read up on the spec's. More importantly I didn't
have anything to do with the creation of any of these tapes.
Anyone have any comments on the readability of 8-13 year old 8mm and 12-13
year old 4mm?
Also, does anyone have any idea what the "autodump" format might be? I'm
guessing some sort of dump varient, that can hopefully be read by
ufsrestore.
Zane