On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Jim Arnott wrote:
> A friend seems to have come into a pile of Exabyte 8505XL and tapes.
> 18gb IIRC. Supposedly for Suns, but perusing Exabyte's site shows that
> they'll fit in just about everything except Mac. Any interest? Anyone
> know what they might be worth?
>
> <http://www.exabyte.com/support/online/documentation/hardware.cfm?id=109>
>
> P-mail reply please. Judging from some of the other lists I'm on, the
> moon seems to be in an intolerant to OT posts phase.
I'm not sure I'd call them completely OT. Just 7/14GB (uncompressed /
compressed) on an 8mm DAT tape. When they get old, they tend to drift
(helical scan heads) and may start producing tapes that won't be read by
other drives without re-alignment. They look to be the same capacity as
the Exabyte 8700, basically extended length "XL" 8500 drives. I've got an
8700 and an 8500 that came with a pile of first-generation RS/6000
hardware, and some more 8700s that came with a fairly new (by CCmp
standards) NCR refrigerator (worldmark 5100M).
Looking at Exabyte's docs, their technical doc was updated last in 1994 -
which means the drives may have been out in 1993, and probably are
on-topic.
Personally, if you want reliable backups, I'd stick with a DDS 4mm DAT
drive (which I have one of - and the tapes are cheap), a DLT drive (if you
can spend the dough on tapes), or optical media drive. Of course, some of
those _are_ off-topic.
Pat
--
Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www-rcd.cc.purdue.edu
Received on Fri Feb 14 2003 - 22:43:00 GMT