Reading old tapes

On 5/23/2006 at 8:00 PM Brad Parker wrote: The problem with a lot of old Overland drives is that they're basically plastic wonders, where many of the heavy-duty units have at least some part of the chassis that's diecast. Normally, this wouldn't be too awful, but the plastic used on the Overland seems to age badly and break easily. I've had two not survive eBay shipping--no external signs of damage on units packed in styrofoam blocks, but one broken to smithereens and the other badly damaged (but repairable). Some of the Overlands will talk to a PC parallel port, however. If you need SCSI, one of the HP's or Ciphers are pretty good--and many of the HP's can tackle 800 bpi tapes, in addition to the 1600 and 6250 densitites But in the sub-200 lb. category, if you're willing to go with a Pertec interface, the Fujitsu open-reel drives are hard to beat for being nearly indestructible. Sun used them extensively. I understand that there existed a SCSI interface card for the Fuji M2444, but I've never seen one, nor heard of anyone actually using one. Cheers, Chuck