Re: pricing of tapes

Dan-the K wrote:


J. Clarke wrote:
Dan-the K wrote:

What affects the price of tapes (a/k/a Data Cartridges) on eBay? For
example, 4mm DAT (DDS-a) and Exabyte 8mm tapes typically cost about
$20. from a reseller, but $4 or less on eBay. Do the eBay sellers get
them by theft, wholesale at a huge discount, or are these tapes
"irregulars?"

In some cases they are surplus stock or obtained from liquidators
subsequent to the failure of a business that had a stock on hand, in
others they are
used media. With DLT or LTO used isn't necessarily bad (but keep a
"beater" drive to test them in to make sure that they didn't get coated
with grinding paste or something before you put them in your primary
drive) as they are good for a huge number of passes (in one test the
error rate on DLT was still _decreasing_ at 500,000 passes--in other
words it still
wasn't broken in). 4mm and 8mm are good for a limited number of passes,
so "used" is usually "worn out".

I still use tape drives for backup. Unfortunately, the drives seem to
go bad after about 6 months. I have an Exabyte 8200 which just started
giving permanent tape errors after processing about 1 GB of files.

Do you clean them religiously? Helical scan drives _must_ be cleaned on
a regular basis--the specs for the particular drive will say how
often--this is not optional "when I remember" or "when it acts up"
maintenance, it
_must_ be done or the drive dies. Some later models have an _attempt_ at
self-cleaning built in but it's not wise to trust it.


I'll heed your advice. I clean them weekly and usually run the
cleaning cartridge through about 10x for each cleaning session.
Fortunatley, the cleaning cartridges are cheap.


One risk with used helical scan drives is that they probably have _not_
been
cleaned regularly. If that's they case they may not be salvageable.


They always work when I get them. The problems show up after a few
months.

I'm talking about 5 drives going bad in about that many years.

I've started working with Tandberg SLR4 and SLR5 drives. They sell new
for $400-$1000 and I got brand new ones on eBay for about $55.
However, the tapes, SLR5, QD9400, QIC - 4GB, run $40 on up from
resellers and $15 - $25 on eBay. Wow! Why so much?

Rare and oddball media.

You might want to take a look at DLT. 10 gig DLT drives can be had for
about the same price as your SLR4 and SLR5 drives, and the media can be
had dirt cheap.

Can you recommend a brand and model DLT?

Most of the DLT drives sold are made by Quantum. DLT2000 drives, which are
10/20 gb drives originally selling for several thousand dollars, can be had
for 20 bucks or so and shipping. DLT 3000 and 4000 drives are a bit more.
For under $200 you can get DLT7000 drives that are 35/70 GB--above that you
get into capacities that are still in widespread use and the price starts
going up fast.

Compaq-labelled DLTs are almost always Quantum inside and are generally a
safe bet--the only thing Compaq that I'd trust.

Note that a lot of DLT drives were sold with an HDV interface--always check
that.

Most common problem with DLTs is that they miss the tape leader and have to
be opened up to recover the hook. It's no big deal once you've done it a
few times but the first time I opened up a $6000 drive to go fishing was
scary as Hell.

Here's something I haven't figured out. I got a new Tandberg SLR5
drive. It worked fine on a PS/2 77 Bermuda off of Spock. However, the
downloaded software requires ASPI so I upgraded the firmware on a PC
750 with Adaptec. I couldn't rely on this latter machine for making
backups with the Tandberg - it would generate fatal write errors about
4% of the way into a 5GB backup. I moved it back to the PS/2 77 and it
works fine there. Why the difference? An Exabyte 8500, OTOH, makes
great backups from the PC 750. Any ideas?

Do not know--I'd call it a vagary of the hardware. Adaptec host adapters
are much overrated IMO. They were never able to put together a decent RAID
controller until they bought out DPT.


Dan


John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

Dan

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
.

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