sun 88780 on ebay

[David Collins]

I was the mass storage region specialist for HP Australia when these came out. They were pretty reliable and compared to the previous 7970 and 7974 drives that had start/stop capstans, they were pretty good on tapes. 

I just restored a 7980XC (HP commercial version of the 88780) and it all worked after I reinitialised the gains in each channel. 

David Collins
+61 424 785 131

> On 29 Jan 2019, at 2:57 pm, Paul Berger via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 2019-01-28 9:19 p.m., Lyle Bickley via cctalk wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Jan 2019 14:04:42 -0800
>> Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> https://www.ebay.com/itm/132933407806
>>> 
>>> this is interesting because of the price and that all of the Sun
>>> drives I've ever come across had the 800bpi option in them
>> That's been my experience, too. The 88780 I use is a Sun drive with
>> 800/1600/6250.
>> 
>> What I love about these drives is that each track is adjustable
>> electronically for skew - which means one can adjust it to read
>> incorrectly skewed tapes without having to adjust/move the tape head!
>> (Of course, you have to re-adjust it "back" to normal - which makes it
>> something you want to do only when absolutely necessary).
>> 
>> I only wish the 88780's tape handling was a bit more "gentle"...
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Lyle
> 
> I recall from my field service days these where a pretty fast streamer and very reliable.
> 
> I remember one customer that had one and their data center manager had bought some used tapes from a friend, these tapes where in such bad shape that one of them stuck to the head hard enough to stall the reel motor, which resulted in a billable service call.  Next time I went back the data center manager and his tapes where gone.
> 
> Another call I went on for something other than one of these tape drives, as I am going into the data center I pass a guy pulling tape out of the front of the drive, I thought it looked weird but didn't say anything.  It was a quick call and on my way out I stopp3ed and asked what he was doing and he told me the drive missed the EOT marker and wound completely onto the drive reel and he was now removing it by pulling it out by hand.  I told him he could have saved himself a lot of trouble and not destroyed the tape if he had just wound a few feet onto the supply reel manually, and then a quick load, reset and rewind his reply was "Oh no that would never work!" I was like ok what ever, but by that point it didn't really matter as he already had half a 3600 foot reel in a heap in front of him.
> 
> Paul.
> 
>