HP USB 2.0 Tape Drive

[Olivier Nicole]

Hi Doug,

> Does anyone have had positive or negative experience using these USB-based
> DAT tape drives? Specifically, I am looking at the HP (Hewlett-Packard)

I know that I am not really answering your question but here are a
couple of thoughts that came to my mind when reading your post:

- USB 2 should be able to sustain the transfer speed to stream your
  DAT drive, I checked that point;

- I always considered DAT one of the worse tape solution myself, too
  sensitive to the physical conditions, too prone to errors, could
  never read a tape after 6 months;

- why spending money in a 80GB tape drive when you can have 10TB of
  hard disk for the same price;

I beleive you have a bunch of existing tapes that hold data you must
read. Then I would plug my USB DAT to any operating system that
supports it, transfer the data to some hard disc, and be done with the
tapes. And if FreeBSD cannot use the tape drive, as it is a one time
task only, I would go for some other OS.

Good luck,

Olivier