[TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:40:22PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> > PS: DAT 4mm tape drives, especially whatever Sun was using, were awful.
>
> It's no secret that I enjoyed my years at Sun, but I can't defend these
> drives, I had the same experience.  When I look back on it, the only
> tapes that I remember being reliable where the 9 track reel to reel
> and the QIC-150.  Once it got to GB sized tapes, everything seemed
> like crap.

Well, I'd say even from an audio perspective DATs were crap.  Just not a
good technology.  Before DATs I used Beta decks with a PCM-601ES for
audio; was better than DAT probably because of the larger geometry.  Same
reason that 9 track tapes last a long time - larger features.

In weird DAT tech, I have (although it's currently loaned out), one of the
SGI Archive Python drives that allows the DDS layer to be turned off so
that audio can be read and written directly.