On Sun, 23 Nov 1997, Peter Seebach wrote:

>In message <659nse$2ai$1@colwyn.owl.de>, Matthias Scheler writes:
>>But no matter what nice nicknames or attributes someone finds for me it
>>won't convince me that these floppy tape streamers are of any use. And
>>I doubt that supporting them is of any importance for NetBSD.
>
>I would like to put a voice on the "this would be useful" side.  I have
>one of these, because it cost $80 and my DAT drive cost $1200.  I would
>like to be able to use this drive with some form of Unix, because,
>slow though it may be, it is a kind of media I can't otherwise support.

I know that this comment won't make you feel any better, or get your
tape drive working, but I feel that SCSI Travan TR4 cartridges
offer an acceptable level of price/performance trade off.   Further I
offer this for people who are looking for a tape drive, or may in the
future and will see this on the archives.

INFORMATION: I bought a Seagate Travan 4 internal SCSI tape drive
from www.CMPExpress.com for $276.71.  This was a bare tape mechanism
with no manual or driver.  I plopped this into my FreeBSD workstation
and it worked with out a hick-up.  I don't know that this will work
with NetBSD, but I would think that would. (I run NetBSD on my mac not
my PC)

It ain't as fast as DAT nor are the cartridges as cheap but at $28
for a 4 Gig uncompressed capacity tape it is pretty good for a home
machine or network.

>I don't care if it's stupid, it's better than no tape, and cheaper
>than SCSI.

---------
Christopher R. Bowman
crb@Glue.umd.edu
My home page