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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: good vs cheap 8mm tape drives Date: 30 Jul 1996 21:50:50 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 31 Message-ID: <4tm03q$c0o@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4tb9jj$4f5@byatt.alaska.net> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E marshalk@alaska.net (Marshal Kendziorek) wrote: > So, what is the thinking out there on a good SCSI 8mm tape drive. I > have been reading mixed things about the exabyte 8200. Whats good, > whats cheap and what good and cheap? Too many vastly different opinions on this. To the best of my knowledge, all 8 mm drives are made by Exabyte, so why do you ask at all? ;-) Those drives i have seen are very dissatisfying. I would nobody recommend them at all (one 8200 and one 8505). The success rates of our backups improved drastically after moving to HP-DAT. Not to mention the 20-page document on Exabyte's Web server describing you how to release a cassette from a jamming drive... You need a fairly good screwdriver if you wanna do this. OTOH, if you read the tape FAQ in the handbook, you will notice that some people like Jordan are more than happy with the 8 mm drives, and believe they are much more reliable than 4 mm DAT. I didn't believe in either of them and bought a 2.5 GB QIC drive instead. :-) I don't particularly trust helical scan at all... -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)