Hi All;
It appears my drive has had a fatal brain embolism. After replaceing
the one bad tape yesterday, it used it ok last nite.
Then today, amcheck starts bugging me that it can't find the next
tape. Nothing unusual about that of course. In due time I exchange
the tapes and attempt to rerun amcheck. Its gets to the 3rd slot in
the magazine and hangs up with an i/o error. And it won't eject the
tape. I fiddle around, taking the drive out to see what this old
mechanic might be able to see. All 4 tapes are in the magazine at
this point, so I plug the power back in and coerce it to open by
standing on the open buttun as it scans the magazine. Removing the
tape from slot 3 I find thats its been forwarded thru about 60% of
the tape, so I rewind it manually and re-insert it in the magazine,
leaving about 2 inches of tape on the takeup so it can find the
double bar leader marker for BOT right quick. On reinsertion, and
attempting to load it, the whole thing is now locked up with a
rapidly blinking drive led. Powerdowns have not restored it
apparently because the magazine is apparently locked and it cannot
even do a powerup scan. I'd assume the lock is a partially ejected
cartridge, but I cannot see it, too densely packed in that area. I
can see that one slot of the magazine is empty however.
So, at this point its been a 2 year run of good luck with DDS2, and
its time to move on. I'd like to stay with an internal changer like
this one, and I really don't need any more daily capacity than a DDS4
would give.
You are all talking up the DLT decks, but they all seem to be a bit
more expensive than a home user would really feel like spending, and
the best price for DLT-IV media is a 5 pack plus a cleaning tape at
$100 on ebay. Thats a far cry from the $25 I was spendng for a 10
pack of DDS2-120's. They also claim a million passes & thats a lot
of passes, far more than the heads in the drive will ever last by a
factor of /50 I'd guess.
The Sony AIT-1 looks ok, but many of those are probably worn out by
now. So does the AIT-2, but again, the $ slow me down.
So what does the retired home user with a 600 dollar budget (500 for
the deck, 100 for media) look for today when he goes touring on ebay?
--
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M
99.26% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
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