[SunRescue] Really Big Hardware That Makes Noise And Takes Up Space

[James Lockwood]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2000, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   The tape drive you're talking about is the Fujitsu M2444AC.  One of the
> heaviest 9-track drives I've ever had to move.  What great drives!

Had one on my VAX, PERTEC interface.  Traded it to Tim Shoppa (big-time
VAX/PDP-11 head) for a carload of serial terminals.  :)

>   On that subject...though not as visually impressive, if one needs 9-track
> capability (which many folks do, despite the widespread belief that 9-track is
> "dead") I wholeheartedly recommend the HP 88780.  It's much smaller than a big
> Fujitsu (about 7" tall in a rack), autoloading, SCSI, and some versions have
> caches and hardware compression.  They're showing up more and more frequently
> on the surplus market, and are nearly to the point where they're affordable to
> almost anyone.

Seconded.  That's the Kennedy mechanism that HP built the driver
electronics for, and Sun and at least a half dozen other OEMs built cases
and sold them.  The Sun "tabletop" version is particularly nice looking,
and easily rackable by pulling the side skins.

Only minuses are that you don't get to see the tapes spinning, and if the
leader doesn't get picked up correctly the drive gets cranky.  I did have
one spray out over a hundred feet of tape inside it when the tape snapped.

Anyone got sources for reasonably priced SCSI 3480 tape drives?  Those big
3480 autoloaders were great to watch.

I used to have a keychain 9-track leader cutter, wonder what ever happened
to it.  Probably a collectors item now.

-James