For a small project I had almost 30 years ago (definitely a non-IBM project) I purchased an Overland Tape unit. It was SCSI attached. I also had a DVD writer attached to the PC and did a fair bit of coding to make software that would read a 9-track tape and write the data on DVD. Included were utilities to recover the data in a variety of formats and write a new 9-track tape if that was what was required. The goal was to help with "archived" data on 9-track tapes. An odd characteristic of the programming was to accept data blocks that caused read errors (after a number of retrys, of course) and write the data on the DVD with an appropriate flag in my header for the data record. While writing the programs I assumed this was an oddball feature, not realizing how many data errors we would encounter when reading "archived" tapes. In the locations where we used the "product" the old 9-track tapes were stored in appropriately controlled areas, etc, etc. No obvious customer sloppy storage or handling.
You might want to give serious thought about handling a fair number of errors when reading old old old tapes! The Overland Tape unit worked well, especially if the programming was such that it did not need to stop between records. I did not associate the data errors with a drive problem; it handled "newer" data tapes without problems. Bill ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
