They were all stored together so I put it down to bit rot... until I went to pack the drive away and found its belt lying on the bench underneath. It's never what you think will get you that gets you :(
My drive didn't last that long. It lost the end of tape sensor... being an optical sensor and a small hole in the tape. I cleaned it up a couple of times, and rewound a few tapes, but in the end it just became unviable. No idea what I did with the tapes themselves now.
At different times, my tapes did different duties. Backups of course, and
after some time I found a door that would let you use a tape as a file area.. of course it had latency in retrieving the file for download, but being able
to have a slab of monolithic data was handy, and could free up drive space.
I only ever had SCSI in the Apple II world, and there were plenty of cheapish drives kicking around, like the ol' Archive Viper but I could never get them
to talk to any of the available software.
Spec
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