In article <199711232015.VAA00374@gytha.home.net>,
	Paul Sijben <sijben@acm.org> writes:
> Could you substantiate the other two claims?

a) unreliabile

A few years ago I worked for a authority in my holydays. They used these
beast to transfer datas from to the computing center. And in the few
weeks he had to recreate the transfer tapes several time because the
tape drive and the other side couldn't read them. And from time to time
our tape drive wasn't even able to read its own old backup tapes.

b) not durable

I know several people who bought these kind of devices. After about half
a year - shortly after the guarantee expired :-) - most of the drives
needed a calibration or an exchange of the mechanical parts because they
weren't able to read tapes any more.

> If you are right about those I'll buy a DAT drive :-)

It must not be a DAT streamer. A good old 250MB Tandberg is a fine thing.
And used Exabyte 8200 drives are cheap these days.

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                http://home.owl.de/~tron/