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Tandberg Tape Drive. . .

C

cobalt1959

Member
Joined
May 26, 2012
Messages
17
Location
St. Joseph, MO
Yesterday I bought an old tower from the local computer place. It had a Tandberg SLR5 4/8GB tape drive installed. I know nothing about these or even what it was until I looked it up so I simply removed it. I have the head unit which goes into a CD-ROM slot, the cable, and the SCSI card which is ISA. I don't have any tapes for it, however. Does anyone still use these and would anyone here be looking for a setup like this?
 
Doug G said:
If you have any old tape drives that can read DC300/300XL/600A tapes I'd be interested.
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If you don't mind QIC02-interface (I'll include an Alliance Tech ISA adapter), I have a spare Tandberg TDC3650 drive if you can verify compatibility with your formats. (Contrary to what some google searches turn up, it's not a SCSI drive--the interface is QIC02).
 
Doug G said:
If you have any old tape drives that can read DC300/300XL/600A tapes I'd be interested.
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I do have a couple (with floppy interface) but unfortunately I have a couple of systems that need them to load UNIX (if the rubber wheels and bands are even still good). Sounds like Chuck might have something for ya; good luck!
 
MikeS said:
Awww... and here I thought I'd finally found a suc^H^H^H^H^H someone who can truly appreciate those old classics...
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I think some of the old floppytape drives were some of the most godawful pieces of garbage pushed onto the public as "backup" options. The Datasonix Pereos being the exception--it was worse than any floppy tape.

ndc-04.jpg


That being said, last year, I stumbled on some DC1000 minicart backups (20MB carts) that I made back in 1987 on an Irwin floppytape drive. Every single one read just fine. Can't say the same about my DDS1 backups of much later, however.
 
Chuck(G) said:
If you don't mind QIC02-interface (I'll include an Alliance Tech ISA adapter), I have a spare Tandberg TDC3650 drive if you can verify compatibility with your formats. (Contrary to what some google searches turn up, it's not a SCSI drive--the interface is QIC02).
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I'm interested, what OS will the adapter run under? Linux would be preferred.

The cartridges were all written from DEC DSM-11 systems which saved everything in ascii, no binaries involved. If I can read the tapes into a file I believe I'll have a good shot at being able to retrieve the data I'm looking for (which is the old service call records from the customer service department I ran for our small company in the mid '80's). I've been off-and-on trying to find this datafile for a couple years now, in fact it was searching for help that brought me to these forums a little while ago. I've been through my old disks so I'm down to tapes as my last hope in finding the file.
 
NetBSD used to have decent support for the thing. Linux drivers exist, but they've suffered badly, being left in the propwash of new Linux revisions. I don't even bother with them.

Tell ya what, send me a tape that you're sure doesn't have the file you're looking for and I'll let you know if I can read it using this thing--or any other drive I have.
 
Chuck(G) said:
NetBSD used to have decent support for the thing. Linux drivers exist, but they've suffered badly, being left in the propwash of new Linux revisions. I don't even bother with them.

Tell ya what, send me a tape that you're sure doesn't have the file you're looking for and I'll let you know if I can read it using this thing--or any other drive I have.
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Thanks! I am in the middle of saving data off a dead raid disk now, I'll PM you later this weekend for details.
 
Chuck(G) said:
If you don't mind QIC02-interface (I'll include an Alliance Tech ISA adapter), I have a spare Tandberg TDC3650 drive if you can verify compatibility with your formats. (Contrary to what some google searches turn up, it's not a SCSI drive--the interface is QIC02).
Click to expand...

Interesting, do you need a special SCSI card for QIC02 standard (looks like 50 pin SCSI)? I have a 2GB (2/4GB?) Tandberg drive and I assumed it was just SCSI. The tapes don't have a model number just this written on the back 1107060105 MADE IN USA WA6 6008 C1 2 M 2.0GB and they are huge (4"x6"x5/8").
 
I have a Tandberg Panther 2500DSe drive that uses 2.5gb cartridges 3M "Magnus 2.5". It's definitely a SCSI drive, and doesn't handle my older tapes from QIC-02 drives.
 
Unknown_K said:
Interesting, do you need a special SCSI card for QIC02 standard (looks like 50 pin SCSI)? I have a 2GB (2/4GB?) Tandberg drive and I assumed it was just SCSI. The tapes don't have a model number just this written on the back 1107060105 MADE IN USA WA6 6008 C1 2 M 2.0GB and they are huge (4"x6"x5/8").
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There's a lot of confusion out there about tape interfaces. It all starts with them all being 50 pin.

QIC-36 is the most brutally simple and you usually see this on older drives, such as older Caliper drives. The controller handles data separation, positioning, etc. PC controllers for QIC-36 drives are usually full-length cards.

QIC-02 is the next step up--it puts some intelligence (not much) and data separation/encoding into the drive. Still 50 pins and not easily told from QIC-36 drives. Controllers tend to very simple--just a few SSI ICs to handle interrupts and DMA and I/O port decoding.

SCSI-1 (and SASI) interfaces are 50 pin, but use the better-known interface. Usually, you can distinguish these by the ID select jumpers--there are three, whereas QIC-36 and QIC-02 have 4 (like a floppy drive).

There's also an early 50 pin "floppy tape" interface used on some versions of the Cipher 525 drives also; meant to interface to 8 inch controller cabling.

The Tandberg 2GB you have is plain old SCSI. If you decide to update the firmware, be very careful--the Tandberg updater will not stop you from flashing the wrong firmware. And then you'll have a bricked drive.
 
I do have a funky old 8 bit card meant for tape drives (50 pin interface), will go dig it out and see what it is.
 
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