On 2015-Oct-07, at 12:56 PM, Glen Slick wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilp...@cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
>>
>> I have an HP 7970A - 9-track, 800BPI - with my HP 2116. I wrote monitor
>> commands to exercise it and do tape dumps from it.
>>
>> They're uncommon compared to 1600 & > BPI drives, figured that was because
>> the 800 standard was older and saw a shorter life before being superseded,
>> but are such drives that rare or hard to come by?
>>
>> (I rather wished it was 1600 so I could read more-common tapes.)
>
> I have an 800BPI 7970B in a 2113B rack system. I've never gotten
> around to trying to get it up and running. Are they fairly reliable
> drives to get going again? I don't have any other 800BPI drives to
> write any tapes to read with it.
Well, the unit here was in pretty good physical condition as received.
It had a cascading failure in the capstan driver but it was a fairly
straightforward fix.
I think there was one sluggish/partially-seized pulley bearing (freed up with
some oil).
Pretty rugged drives as you know. I wonder about the capstan rubber in the long
term but I think that's about the only thing to worry about on age alone.
I think bitsavers nowadays has manuals and schematics for the B version as you
have, years ago I had to do some reverse-engineering for the capstan repair.
This page is over ten years old and needs some updating, but FWIW:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/HP21xx/HP2116CSys/index.html
Note the tape drive repair log page linked there.
