You can use audio cable with most tape recorders. Then you'd just play files as sound. Probably very slow r/w though. Also tapes are not that long lasting if I recall, why not just cd roms, they work great if you dont rw everyday? Also memory cards only decay while reading and writing, so would be a better investment anyways data density wise.

>>2034 Look into half height drives, they are about the length of really old CD-ROM drives while fitting into a single 5.25" bay. I would avoid the external drives, mostly because you find better deals on internal only SAS controllers and cables, and can use the other 3 channels on the cable for drives. External drives are nearly all Fibre Channel, which means optical cables. I would not stick the drive in my main machine for 2 reasons: 1. I love the sound of the tape drive, but after the 2nd hour of non-stop servo motor sounds, it wears on you. 2. The SAS controllers and drives your going to be finding are old datacenter stock where energy use and heat output are an afterthought. Make sure you can find the software to run LTFS on your drive. Even though there's really only 2 manufacturers of these drives, you cannot mix and match that software. For example, all the Quantum, IBM, and HPE drives are all the same, but will only work with each respective software suites. Firmware access is a pain in the ass, if you can even find it. I have an HPE drive, and had to dig out the latest firmware from one of their support DVD's for a ProLiant server, everything else wen't behind a paywall ever since HP split into multiple companies. If your using Linux, you can fall back to plain old TAR and store data that way, but it's a giant pain in the ass keeping track of the data if you don't use some form of library software to keep track of everything, especially if your archives are huge. I use mine mostly for full system images by using a NAS to copy to first, then onto tape so I have 3-2-1 backups. LTFS is really nice, but if your dead set on using a GUI filemanager, you have to turn off thumbnails. I would stick with using the terminal or better yet, midnight commander for transferring data. You can use the files directly off the tape with LTFS, video for example, set your player up with a large precache so it reads the whole file in, you don't want the drive to be seeking when you rewind a few seconds back.

I forgot to add, most SAS controllers are dog slow during the boot sequence, you can easily double the time it takes your system to boot up, even with no drives detected. They are all designed to be in a system that resets once or twice a year, not every day.

>>2202 >>2203 Got a box and barely used DDS4 tapes, should I get a drive or just toss them?

>>2432 Depends on how much money you have to spend and if you need cold storage. If you've got some folders you want a backup of, especially if you want to offsite it, then it's hard to go wrong with tape.

>>2432 If you don't mind getting friendly with mt and tar and have a way of keeping track of the data,(printout of tree or [code]ls -lh[code] would work) you should be gold. 5.25 internal drives seem to be dirt cheap, along with the HBA's. You would be dealing with an older, more confusing era of SCSI cabling, but there are Ultra320 pcie HBA's out there that would work on a modern machine.