My exabyte eliant 8 mm tape just went on the blink, so I've sent it to Pacific Data (http://www.pacificdata.com/tape_drive.html) for repair. They also sell tape drives, but looks like mainly newer ones. Probably have some old ones from the repair business. Search ebay for exabyte or "dat tape" and buy a junker, pacific data can probably fix it for $200-300.
If the tape happens to be vax backup format, there is a utility available for reading them on unix/linux. I also have a procedure for using unix with a tape drive to make tape images for the Simh vax emulator running on linux or windows to read, you can then FTP files from the emulator to linux. This preserves a little more of the metadata than unix vmsbackup utility eab Min, Xiaoshan wrote:
Dear CCP4 community, We have a few datasets that reside in tapes (Sony QG-112M 8 mm tape and Maxell DDS-2 4 mm tape). I have been searching the internet for tape drives ( and cable) but haven’t found anything. Does anyone know where we can purchase compatible tape drives for these lovely tapes? Or if you have a spare working set sitting in your graphic room and would like to sell them, that will be wonderful. Thanks. Xiaoshan Min. Ph.D. Molecular Structure Amgen San Francisco 1120 Veterans Blvd. South San Francisco, CA 94080
