Interesting. I have a Contemporary Cybernetics 8505 drive that I think
used the Exabyte tape system, will have to dig it out and see what it
looks like. Used them at the IEEE Computer Society for years but finally
went with IBM LTO tape libraries at Science. The LTOs were more reliable.
C
On 1/30/2021 9:25 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
On 01/30/2021 07:41 PM, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote:
btw, I found an Exabyte 8200 in a pile of stuff I bought at VCF East
last year (but one :-) ) Does anybody on the list have experience
getting this to work on a Dilog SQ703 under NetBSD?
Exabytes are pretty classic SCSi tape drives. They come in single-ended
and differential configurations, you need to check which you have.
The downside is they have a short working life. Back in the day, there
were outfits that would
rebuild them at an affordable price, I think they cannibalized video
drives for parts.
I don't know what failed on them, but it seemed that whatever it was
would fail even if powered-off and sitting on the shelf.
You should have no trouble running them on anything that handles SCSI
tape drives.
Jon
