I'm not an expert on mag tapes, but it makes sense to me that 9-track
tapes, where the tracks "line up" when the tape is wound onto a reel,
suffer more "print-through" than helical scan tapes, where tracks are not
aligned with those under them on a reel. I recall a suggestion that 9-track
tapes should be mounted and rewound once in a while, to reduce
print-through. We used Exabytes for disk backups for years, back when tape
capacity exceeded disk capacity. I doubt I'll see that again, but, as noted
I'm not an expert on mag tapes.

On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 1:35 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

> On 11/25/2019 12:45 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:40:22PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> >> PS: DAT 4mm tape drives, especially whatever Sun was using, were awful.
> > It's no secret that I enjoyed my years at Sun, but I can't defend these
> > drives, I had the same experience.  When I look back on it, the only
> > tapes that I remember being reliable where the 9 track reel to reel
> > and the QIC-150.  Once it got to GB sized tapes, everything seemed
> > like crap.
> >
>
> The Exabyte 5GB and up stuff was pretty good. LTOs, after having worked
> with them for the past 13 years, I can definitely say, are quit awesome.
>
> DLT tapes and especially robots, well, it took HP about 5 years to get
> the firmware right for a certain robot, the model of which, I don't
> recall ...
>
> art k.
>
>