Back before I last cleared out my incoming mails, somebody suggested it would be a good idea to have a spare drive if I were using obsolescent equipment. I had just ordered a DittoMax parallel port tape drive and some tapes. The other day a clearance house had them for $29, including one 10BG (compressed) cartridge. I had bought some of the cartridges at $20 each, and they had them at $15, so I got a second drive and a couple more cartridges.
Thanks for the sound advice. I probably would not have thought of this until I had a problem. I like the fact that the software includes a DOS version and provides for making a pair of diskettes to restore a backup made under Windows. Wonder where to look for Linux software that would work with this drive? Subscribe to the Parport conference and notice there is still a bit of work to be done before a wide variety of parallel port devices work smoothly in Linux. Wonder if USB 2 or Firewire will take over instead, or even the forthcoming high speed serial bus? With a bit of luck this device will do until a writable/rewritable DVD format becomes standard and the drives and media come down into my budget range. Saw also that use of ruthenium, one row below iron in the periodic table, in hard drive surface coatings may give a factor of five increase in areal density over the next few years. So we may see the era of the 500 GB hard drive at the price of current 100 GB ones. Then we will need the faster transfer capability. Feliç Nadal i Bon Any Nou, Choppy ================================================ BRLUG - The Baton Rouge Linux User Group Visit http://www.brlug.net for more information. Send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to change your subscription information. ================================================
