Lord Isildur wrote:
> 
> unless you have old tapes to read or you _really_ want a blast from the
> past, i wouldnt bother with 9tracks. 

Pardon ? That's the easiest to transport data between computers.

> You can barely put 50 megs on a reel. 

What about 150-220 MBytes UNCOMPRESSED ?
Multiply this with some compression of 2-3 and you get a nice size tape.
So you can still make a very good backup of a pdp or vax system.
And they are reliable. Some tapes I have here are older than 20 years,
and work fine.

> It looks very impressive, but the tape is _not_ cheap, 

Because some people don't like them anymore, you get them mostly for
free.
;-)

> and it is laborious to load and unload with many drives,

All of mine are front loaders, so the difference to your DAT tape would
be, 
that I have to press the Load/Online button.

> Personally i'm fond of 4mm DATs, especially good ol'fashioned DDS1's,
> largely because theyre dirt cheap and quie reliable. The best DDS1 drives
> ive seen are archive pythons and, naturally, DEC drives. The TZ85 is a
> great little indestructible tape unit. plus, since everybody's buying DDS2
> or DDS3's these days, the drives are cheap and the tapes can be had for
> 2-5 dollars new.

And DAT is really nice in producing one way backups. 
 

> just my $.02

my too ;-)

cheers