[Info-vax] TLZ7

[John Wallace]

On Nov 4, 6:00 pm, smithfarm <presnyprek... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What puzzles me is the date "December 13, 1985"
> > which is definitely much earlier than DDS-2 technology.
>
> Well, it actually says "Q.C. PASSED 85.12.13". Since YY-MM-DD is quite
> common in Asia, where I assume this was made, I interpreted it as
> "December 13, 1985". But you are right - according to Wikipedia DDS-1
> came out in 1989.
>
> > If it really is a TLZ07, i.e. a DDS-2 drive,
> > it will only take DDS-2 and DDS-1 media, no DDS-3 and above.
>
> I read somewhere that there is a jumper setting (on the real TLZ07) that
> turns media recognition on and off.
>
> To be sure, I will not use DDS-3 media in it, but it was interesting
> that it worked at all. I will writing a longer file to a DDS-2 tape and
> see what happens.
>
> I don't have any DDS-1 tapes yet to try. I shopped around and it looks
> like they cost about $4 here and, since I guess nobody uses them
> anymore, there is a 2-week lead time between ordering and delivery.
>
> In the meantime, I found the autoloader cartridge. It was on the bottom
> of a box of tapes that came with the drive. The loader takes 4 tapes.
>
> Nathan

Grr. Forgot a piece (interrupted by phone call).

You may be able to get the drive vendor ID and model number without
the use of a screwdriver, if you have access to something that is
capable of sending (and reporting the response to) a SCSI "Inquire"
command to the DAT drive (and maybe the loader). On VMS/Alpha you'd do
this with RZtools_Alpha, which may already be on your system (e.g. in
SYS$ETC).

Best of luck.