Let's talk about something other than the usual banter for a moment.
Disregarding the obnoxiousness and retardation associated with actually getting a tape drive set up, where is the best place to actually acquire one? Online venues seem to suck donkey balls. Ebay is horrendously expensive, and the usual tech surplus websites are asking a lot as well. Anybody know some places to even find one?
>buying this extremely complicated and relatively niche good is expensive!
No fucking shit. Get it off Ebay or Amazon.
Obvious post is obvious?
How many times are we going to fucking go in circles user?
I'm trying to determine if there is some other obscure website where tech like this gets sold for bargain basement bin prices. FUck,even an LTO 1 Drive would be fun to tinker with.
My guess would be government auctions? Liquidations?
>some other obscure website where tech like this gets sold for bargain basement bin prices
>I want a 2000 dollar drive for 500 dollars instead!
Yes, websites like that exist, never mind the fact that word of mouth and people flipping items with Ebay or Amazon would basically guarantee that they have zero stock of anything permanently. You know that you can just sit on Ebay and refresh it until someone is retarded enough to put something up for a bargain right? Try doing that.
Why do you want a tape drive and what specifically for?
He probably wants to put tapes in it user.
could guess
>just a cool mechanical format
>completely backing up old systems
>long-term data storage
To play with. I have literally no other reason for it but for tinkering.
Thanks, Captain Obvious!
you could literally just mess about with a standard tape deck, add some electronics, write a driver, hey presto diy tape storage
>tfw have fuck tons of blank cassettes
>tfw have several spare readers around
this sounds like very a interesting idea
how would you even go about this?
Found a good and easy way that might be able to be automated with some scripts instructables.com
Which literally builds off of the Kansas City Standard, a shitty, error prone piece of garbage used as a cheap storage medium from the fucking 1970s.
Well, there were methods of using VHS tapes and a proprietary card to transmit said data. I think the design was from Russia...
Found it
Honestly the helical scanning tech and shitty quality of most VHS decks is going to fuck you over. You'd have to build a custom solution, preferably using liner serpentine with multiple read heads to maximize the amount of data. Then you'd need to implement decent Error Correction.
If I was looking for a reliable and actually decent solution I would just buy modern tape decks and a reader, this is mainly just for fun
I'm not OP btw
I went to a doctor office and they had what was clearly an old, un-used tower set up for visitors to use while they wait, and it had a tape drive. That's the only time I've seen one in the wild.
Ask them how much they'd sell it for
eBay, Craigslist. I got all mine for free, but that was 10 years ago when people were just tossing them.
Tape drives
They are still the best medium for long term data storage
What do you recommend then?
LTO fills all the roles. Even normal people could use tape drives now that Linear Tape File System is a thing. You basically can drag and drop files like the cart is a diskette or a USB drive.
Then what should you use to encode the files onto a cassette? I can't find anything else like it
Funny thing about dropping tape drives, if you drop one from a few inches, it can destroy the data.
Is that true