[TUHS] can anyone use QIC 6250 tape cartridges?

[peter@rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy)]

On 2013-Jan-28 05:22:02 +0200, Aharon Robbins <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>Hi. I have two QIC 6250 tape cartridges that have been in (I hope) dry
>boxes for over 15 years. I suspect they're still usable but have no
>equipment with which to test them or try to read them.

I don't think I can directly help you but did something similar
recently with very mixed results.  I found a box of QIC-6150 tapes of
a similar vintage and tried to read them.  Whilst I could read some
of the tapes, most of them failed in 2 ways:
1) The tensioning band broke.  Where I thought the contents would be
   interesting, I opened the cases & swapped the band for one that
   worked.
2) There's no error correction (and I'm not sure how good the error
   detection is).  In many cases, I'd get lots of retries and then
   some resultant data - but if I tried again, I'd get a different
   length result.

I also had a couple of tapes that were visibly moldy - I didn't take
them out of their protective cases.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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