Re: Looking for a tape drive

[fmlin@netcom.com (Frank M. Lin)]

>>I picked up mine for about $310.  It's a Wangtek 2150.  Supports 150mb
>>tapes, & 250 extended length tapes.  The guy I got it from might have
>>a couple of more, but I can't find his e-mail anymore.  It's new.

>Are you able to take full advantage of those tapes (ie. use them for
>150 and 250 Mb respectively)?  My impression, from reading the Computer
>Shopper article that these capacities were the maximums, attainable only
>if compression was used.  Is the compression being done automatically by
>the drive, or does GSTape handle it?  (Or is it not being done?)  Or is
>this only the case with the mini-cartridges?  Or am I totally wrong? :-)

To my understanding, cardtridge (sp?) tapes don't support hardware
compression.  Only DAT drives do.  You can get software compression, but
I don't recall seeing that option in GStape.

It gets 250mb by using extended length tapes.  I've just back up over
150mb of data into, so it seems to work.

-- 
frank m. lin
fmlin@netcom.com