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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!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: whats a good external SCSI tape? Date: 23 Oct 1996 22:55:11 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 25 Message-ID: <54m7of$s7t@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <DzHp5B.6Bt.G.nanguo@nanguo.chalmers.com.au> <54dhae$3gs@uriah.heep.sax.de> <54j67v$soq@newsbr.eunet.fr> 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 Frederic.Marand@osinet.fr (Frederic MARAND) wrote: > >Tandberg 2.5 GB QIC are fine (the latter is for those like me who find > >helical scan to be inherently horrible :). > It seems many people dislike helical scan backup units, but I never > could figure out why: ... Because the mechanics are much more fragile _by design_. I've seen jamming tape cartridges that self-destroyed the tape on exertion, for example (on an otherwise fine working) HP-DAT drive. As long as you can tolerate this (e.g. by cycling through 7 tapes per week, so it doesn't harm much if one of them is lost), it's ok. Also, helical scan drives are told to have a higher abrasion rate, so you ought to throw away a cassette after 50 or 100 hours. This partly compensates for them being cheaper than e.g. QIC. -- 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. ;-)