8mm data cartridges

[Chuck Guzis]

On 8 May 2007 at 5:32, Jules Richardson wrote:

> I'm not sure what my chances are of finding a drive to read them are though 
> (and worse still, such a drive might not be SCSI and so require a proprietary 
> interface card and drivers). The packrat in me wants to try reading them 
> rather than just tossing them out though :-)

I've got a few of the Exabyte drives.  The late-model cost-reduced 
drives (top loading) are miserably unreliable. The standard front-
loaders were far better constructed.  Many shipped in their own boxes 
with LCD display that would indicate status, number of bytes 
remaining on the tape, etc.  

8 mm wasn't bad.  At about that time, we were heavily involved in 
specifying tape for customers and we tended to rank things this way:

DLT > 8mm > 4mm DAT > Travan > QIC. 

8mm, like DAT and DLT is an immediate-verify (read after write) 
technology and isn't bad for the time.  There was the same business 
about confusing 8mm video carts with 8mm data carts as there was with 
4 mm DAT audio with 4 mm data.  Manufacturers said not to substitute, 
but a lot of individuals did.

All of the 8mm gear that I saw was SCSI.  It might be that some 
manufacturers put together specialized boxes as they did with 4mm 
(Valitek is one name that comes to mind) to allow for printer-port 
transfers also.

I used to have an ISA card that one hooked up to a VHS recorder to do 
backups.  It was incredibly slow and unreliable.   

Even in 1991, it was getting to be obvious that the era of tape 
backup was doomed, with hard disk storage capacities growing like 
Topsy and tape lagging more an more--although I still use DLT 
occasionally.

Cheers,
Chuck