9 May
2007
9 May
'07
1:43 p.m.
I have a TTI tape drive somewhere, it's got 2 8510's in it and an LCD display on
it. looking in it before it was standard exabyte 8510's with their special
controller board connected to them IIRC.
Quoting Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>:
Jules Richardson wrote:
Actually,
they're pretty common from what I have seen,
but then again, I work with lots of systems that use
them. Those are Exabyte cartridges - you need to find
an Exabyte drive.
Aha... interesting. I'll give local Freecycle a prod and see if anyone has one nearby that I can borrow. What with
Andy's post and another
offer off-list I expect I can attempt a read at some point, anyway!
Well, progress - I now have on the desk a "TTi 8510", which I'm hoping
is
compatible with the tapes I have.
Three questions:
1) Is this drive single-ended SCSI or differential? The backplate
doesn't hint
one way or the other. A poke around a few reseller sites seems to hint
that
it's a SE drive, but it would be nice to confirm that with someone who
has one
before I plug it into a machine and toast the SCSI bus :-)
2) I even found a cleaning tape. Is there anything special which needs
to be
done to use it - or can just insert the cleaning tape into the drive and
expect it to do its stuff automatically?
3) Do these drives ever suffer from "roller goo" like QIC drives? i.e.
is it
sensible for me to whip the cover off and do a visual inspection before
even
trying the cleaning tape? (That's perhaps a rhetorical question... I
normally
do visual inspections on stuff before blindly trying to use them. I'm
just
feeling lazy :-)
cheers
Jules