Actually, these drives produce nominally 10GB capacity on a 112 meter tape unless you turn off the "hardware" compression. The ability to do this is is necessary in order to maintain compatibility with the "standard" 8mm tapes produced by the EXB8200 drives which were very popular at one time. If your drive has a beige front with a grey knurled-finish button on the front, it's likely it's an 8505XL, which takes 160-meter tapes on which it yields nominally 15 MB of capacity. I harbor no ill will toward Sony or Exabyte for makeing the drive reject the garden variety video handycam cartridges, though I'm not sure anyone ever did anything specific to make the cheaper/utility grade handycam cartridges useable. The data-grade tapes only cost about 4 bucks for a 112-meter tape that yields about 10 GB of storage. I've got a Travan (1/4" cartridge) tape drive for which the 1 GB tapes cost $40 last time I bought one. I bought the drive at the request of a client. I got that drive back when I was looking for a cardboard box to put a few things in . . . in his dumpster. I can't say I didn't warn him. I've got 8-year-old backup sets that have never faltered, though I routinely do a full backup of EVERYTHING every day. That's the nice thing about having a backup device with sufficient capacity on a single element of its media that it allows a complete backup without anyone having to change the cartridge. That way a backup happens as scheduled, regardless of whether I remember or forget. If I do happen to forget to change the cartridge in the morning, the backup set is overwritten, which is not ideal, but it definitely gets done. It takes a long time, but from NT, via fast ethernet, the job takes only a little time, usually early in the morning, and is fully automatic so I don't have to strain my fading grey cells. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Smith <eric(a)brouhaha.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2000 5:25 PM Subject: Re: exabyte tape unit in I'll will

I've routinely gotten good 8200's for <$50 by searching DejaNews for them. I've happily paid $100 when I needed an 8500, more if it's an 8500C (hardware compression) and if I thought I needed another 8505XL, I'd happily pay $250 for one. The first of these drives I got was from an Exabyte employee who built them from the scrap box. I started using it in '91 and it still backs up about 10 GB every day. It's been quite solid when I've attempted to restore to a replacement drive, and, aside from software quirks, works as well as I need. I have spent MANY hours and days exercising, testing, and verifying with these drives and find them refreshingly reliable. I've never had a backup turn out to be unusable, nor have I lost any files due to media flaws or the drive's inability to recover the data. With the exception of the 8200, all the 8xxx series from Exabyte are SCSI-II, which means there's software to support them. On a separate SCSI channel from the main array, server backup under NT or Netware works VERY well with them. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Bill Pechter &lt;pechter(a)pechter.dyndns.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2000 8:27 PM Subject: Re: exabyte tape unit in I'll tomorrow?