[TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte

[Al Kossow]

On 11/24/19 7:24 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> So that sounds like a different problem.  People correct me if I'm
> wrong but the exabyte drives seemed to have a head alignment problem.

They are 8mm helical-head drives. they wouldn't go out of alignment by
bumping them, the worse would be the tape would lose tension if you
smacked the tensioning arms hard enough

They do have a lot of rubber parts inside.
Rollers crack and belts go soft. I have several dozen dead EX8200s from that.

I have a whole box of 8mm backup tapes that just came in, and a small
number of working drives. The Linux software I wrote to do 9 track tape recovery
from a SCSI 9 track drive works just fine on an Exabyte.

And I'm not offering to read Jason's mystery reels.