Destructive Imaging of DECTAPE II Media
Christian Corti
cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
Thu Jan 29 03:53:17 CST 2015
On Wed, 28 Jan 2015, Al Kossow wrote:
> When I was working on this a couple of months ago, I had hundreds of old
> DC450/600/6150 carts to experiment on and I
> sent out a message about the results. Short answer is bands from 300/450 and
> 600 aren't worth messing with. 6150 are
That's more or less true. I have many old 300/600 tapes with with belts
that broke during or shortly after the treatment. Therefore I use belts
from much newer (about one decade) NOS 600 tapes (thanksfully I have many
dozens of them). They need the hot water treatment beforehand, too. But at
least they work reliably after that.
If you are archiving such tapes you don't need a new belt for each
cartridge. I simply transfer the belt from the archived cartridge to the
next one and keep it in a parts box for a future archiving session.
> The 6150 bands either do not require the warm water treatment or should
> be rehydrated at significantly lower temperature/time. Since I
I had very few 6150 that needed the treatment, too. But in general, you're
right.
> Like I said, I have a big batch of TU58 tapes that I need to process, so I'll
> experiment with different brands of DC-100
> sized tapes when I do it. I'm in the middle of setting up new lab space at
I have many TU58 tapes, but I have never used a TU58 so far. But I
also have a lot of DC100 tapes from HP terminals, and they surely have
the sticky and worn belt problem. And because DC100 tapes are so rare and
*** expensive, I try anything to keep the original belt going.
Christian
More information about the cctech
mailing list