54 TK50 tapes on eBay

[Mark J. Blair]

> On May 23, 2015, at 12:40, Steven M Jones <classiccmp at crash.com> wrote:
> 
>> (after I sell a few more kidneys, that is)
> 
> Careful hunting on eBay can produce LTO-4 capabilities (0.8/1.6TB) for not too many vital organs. Just make sure you've got a fibre channel or SAS interface to talk to it.

Right. Me being the smart, forward-thinking guy I'm not, I bought a nice, sexy Mac Pro, and then a nice little mid-range QNAP NAS that has neither fibre channel nor SAS capabilities before I determined that I really could use proper tape backup and started investigating what interfaces are suitable for that. There's one very nice-looking LTO-6 drive with a Thunderbolt interface that will plug into my Mac Pro. Lots of kidneys for that one!

> 
>> ... but I'm still a bit suspicious of their similar (identical?) tape feeding scheme. All of my bad experience with things like QIC, DAT, etc. had led me to be very suspicious of tape systems other than 1/2" open reel.
> 
> If you take a careful look at the TK and DLT mechanisms, I think you'll see that they're an awful lot closer to an open reel design than any of the cartridge designs (QIC, DAT, 8mm, AIT, etc).
> 
> I'd never say they're perfect because that would immediately render all my backups on any media unreadable. But if I have to trust a tape mechanism, I'll stick with the TK-DLT-LTO line.

Thank you for the reassurances about the mechanism family. That will help once I stumble over another cache of unguarded kidneys. :)


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/