[rescue] anyone with a 4mm dat of reasonable capacity to sell?

[Jeffrey Nonken]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 12:23:13 -0700 (MST), Arthur Wouk <awouk at ra.nilenet.com>
wrote:

> my 4mm dat tape drive had a mechanical failure (won't take in new
> tape, mangled the one it ejected - didn't release the tape). so i am
> looking for a replacement. the old one sits in a 411 box 50pin scsi.
> it is a 2/4gig drive.
>
> anyone with an extra email me. if the email bounces, don't worry - my
> procmail filters log all bounces, and when i fix a path through them,
> i will let you know.

A quick search for DDS-1 drives on eBay didn't show anything, but DDS-2 and
DDS-3 are backwards-compatible.

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&query=DDS-
3

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&query=DDS-
2

eBay is your friend. :)

I believe that DDS-4 is only compatible as far back as DDS-2, so it won't let
you re-use your old tapes. Just for the record, DDS-3 is a more reliable
format than DDS-2, in addition to being a 6x increment in capacity. So I
recommend you just go straight to DDS-3 if you can.

If you aren't familiar with tape lengths, they are:
60: DDS-1, capacity: 1.2g
90: DDS-1, capacity: 2g
120: DDS-2, capacity: 4g
125: DDS-3, capacity: 12g
I don't know what length DDS-4 is and I'm too lazy to look. :) Capacity is
20g.

Those are uncompressed capacities. Double those figures for compressed
capacities, if it makes you feel good and you believe that you can actually
achieve 2:1 compression on anything but highly-repetitive data. My experience
(on complete drive backups) has been about 1.5:1, on a good day with a
running
start and a tail-wind.

My own experience is that Sony drives are better than HP, but YMMV. I presume
either will work on Sun, but I've never tried, so I can't answer to that. The
DDS-3 Sony heads have a 20% duty cycle, the HP version only has a 12% duty
cycle. I don't know anything about Seagate drives.

---
Homer no function beer well without.