8mm data cartridges

[Ethan Dicks]

On 5/8/07, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I can't ever remember seeing 4mm audio DAT tapes
> used for data either. I was under the impression that
> they would stretch or something. It could also be that
> since the audio DAT format didn't really take off at
> all in the consumer field, that the data tapes would
> have been more available.

I thought the dots on the bottom of the carts would cause audio tapes
to be kicked out of data drives.  Is that not so?  I _think_ you could
use data tapes in an audio DAT recorder/player, but I only ever saw
one of those, so I can't say for certain.

The DAT tapes I have (going back to 60meter DDS-1) all have this media
recognition system that the drives are supposed to respect, or so I
thought.  Did I think wrong?

Now that I have a tarabyte at home (1 trillion bytes in box small
enough to palm), I should set up an external SCSI box and check my
backup tapes from a few years back.  I have CD backups from that era
as well (and copies of copies of it all), so I'm not worried about one
(?!?) bad tape ruining my day, but I should take advantage of the
equipment on hand to see what reads and migrate the contents to newer
media.

-ethan

-ethan