Tape Drives on the cheap?

>>59023454
>buying this extremely complicated and relatively niche good is expensive!
No fucking shit. Get it off Ebay or Amazon.

>>59023485
Obvious post is obvious?

How many times are we going to fucking go in circles anon?

I'm trying to determine if there is some other obscure website where tech like this gets sold for bargain basement bin prices. FUck,even an LTO 1 Drive would be fun to tinker with.

>>59023552
My guess would be government auctions? Liquidations?

>>59023552
>some other obscure website where tech like this gets sold for bargain basement bin prices
>I want a 2000 dollar drive for 500 dollars instead!
Yes, websites like that exist, never mind the fact that word of mouth and people flipping items with Ebay or Amazon would basically guarantee that they have zero stock of anything permanently. You know that you can just sit on Ebay and refresh it until someone is retarded enough to put something up for a bargain right? Try doing that.

Why do you want a tape drive and what specifically for?

>>59024012
He probably wants to put tapes in it anon.

>>59024012
could guess
>just a cool mechanical format
>completely backing up old systems
>long-term data storage

>>59024012
To play with. I have literally no other reason for it but for tinkering.

>>59024077
Thanks, Captain Obvious!

>>59024270
you could literally just mess about with a standard tape deck, add some electronics, write a driver, hey presto diy tape storage

>>59024565
>tfw have fuck tons of blank cassettes
>tfw have several spare readers around
this sounds like very a interesting idea
how would you even go about this?

>>59024770
Found a good and easy way that might be able to be automated with some scripts http://www.instructables.com/id/Storing-files-on-an-audio-cassette/

>>59024828

Which literally builds off of the Kansas City Standard, a shitty, error prone piece of garbage used as a cheap storage medium from the fucking 1970s.

>>59024770
Well, there were methods of using VHS tapes and a proprietary card to transmit said data. I think the design was from Russia...


Found it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid


Honestly the helical scanning tech and shitty quality of most VHS decks is going to fuck you over. You'd have to build a custom solution, preferably using liner serpentine with multiple read heads to maximize the amount of data. Then you'd need to implement decent Error Correction.

>>59024910
If I was looking for a reliable and actually decent solution I would just buy modern tape decks and a reader, this is mainly just for fun

>>59024969
I'm not OP btw

I went to a doctor office and they had what was clearly an old, un-used tower set up for visitors to use while they wait, and it had a tape drive. That's the only time I've seen one in the wild.

>>59025009
Ask them how much they'd sell it for

eBay, Craigslist. I got all mine for free, but that was 10 years ago when people were just tossing them.

https://philadelphia.craigslist.org/sop/5995186068.html

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Tape drives

>>59025320
They are still the best medium for long term data storage

>>59024910
What do you recommend then?

>>59024910

LTO fills all the roles. Even normal people could use tape drives now that Linear Tape File System is a thing. You basically can drag and drop files like the cart is a diskette or a USB drive.

>>59024828
>>59024910
Then what should you use to encode the files onto a cassette? I can't find anything else like it

>>59025973
Funny thing about dropping tape drives, if you drop one from a few inches, it can destroy the data.

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>>59026512
Is that true