What tape drive would you recommend?

[Randy Rathbun]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, M. Osten blabbed:
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, michael d hoskins wrote:
> > 8mm - med.  backups
> Getting hard to find anymore...I've got a 13 gig if anyone is interested.

I find them easier to get tapes for than 4mm now. Exabyte is churning them out
left and right, and I think Sony has a few models also. And, when the tapes
quit reading/writing for computer use, you can plop them in your Sony HandyCam
and shoot video! :)

> > 4mm, unfortunately, has issues.....
> I'd have to disagree. 

Same here. The only 4mm drive I ever had trouble with was an old Mountain drive
which was a repackaged Wangdat. Big piece of trash. Also had trouble with BASF
tapes. They (BASF) had a nasty tendency to put the tape in the wrong way, so
you were reading the BACK of the tape. Kind of hard to move the magnetic poles
around. 

> *everyone* uses DDS3 drives, 
I use DDS2.

One final thing, there are some decent 4mm drives floating around on Ebay. 

Also, before I forget - anyone know of a program/method that will allow me to
write MP3s to a 4mm tape? I dont mean to play in a DAT drive - I want to stream
the files off of them so I can just insert a tape, load up XMMS and have a nice
couple of hours of music. There is a thing for Windows that will let you do
this, but I have not found squat for Linux.

Randy