>It's not a DDS-2, but I've been happy with my Exabyte 8700LT 8mm drive
>(running on a NetBSD/i386 machine).  I've found the 120m tapes for about
>$4ea (Maxell from Buycomp, LLC).  I don't know what your drive and media
>costs are for the DDS-2 drive, but do factor in the media.

Drive is around $600.  Finding media in the $3-5 range is pretty easy.  I
was originaly considering a TR-4.  The drives themselves are much cheaper,
but the media is $30-40 apiece.  Figuring that you want mucltiple copies,
and that you want to swap media every few months..I came to the conclusion
that in two years you'd end up running neck and neck in therms of total
cost.

>I don't foresee any problems with any DDS-2 drive under NetBSD, although
>the mac SCSI drivers haven't seen tapes too much...

Well that's god for a start.  Thanks.


Jonathan Carlson added:

>I've been happily using a HyperDAT from APS w/ NetBSD/mac68k 1.3.2 for a
>few months. The tapes I'm using (4mm x {90,120}m) are DDS-2 so I guess the
>drive is too ;-). I think the tapes are something like $10 (in Sweden).

Which is exactly the drive I was looking at.

Steve Revilak
revilak@umbsky.cc.umb.edu