Subject: Cassette Media

From: chris <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed May 14 20:07:00 2003

I just aquired a ClubMac tape drive that I want to test. It is a rebadged 
Teac MT-2ST/N50 cassette drive. I'm hunting around for info, and it looks 
like that uses a 600XD cassette.

A regular audio tape cassette fits in it. Does anyone know if I can use 
regular audio tapes? Maybe a particular style of audio tape? 

I really just want to test the drive to see if it works, so if an audio 
tape will work long enough to write some data and read it again to make 
sure the drive functions, that should be enough. I don't really want to 
plunk down $15 for a data cassette for it to find that the drive is dead.

-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>

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From: John Honniball <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu May 15 13:56:00 2003

> like that uses a 600XD cassette.

I have a Teac cassette drive like this, and I've used it on a Linux
SCSI system.  It worked fine.  However, I did get a tape with it,
which I can dig out and have a closer look at, if it'd help.

--
John Honniball
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Tony Duell)
Date: Thu May 15 15:38:00 2003

> regular audio tapes? Maybe a particular style of audio tape? 

IIRC, the 'digital' tapes have a much higher coercivity than audio tapes. 
You might get an audio tape to work for testing, but I certainly wouldn't 
trust it.

The digital tapes have an extra notch in the rear edge of the cassette 
shell. Some drivea look for this (and maybe even physically require it 
for the cassette to fit). Others don't care.

-tony

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From: John Honniball <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu May 15 17:14:00 2003

Tony Duell wrote:
> shell.

And it's not in the middle of the rear edge, either.  I have a Philips
cassette drive that uses the off-centre notch to detect Side A or Side B
of the tape.  It has two microswitches in the back of the cassette
space, only one of which will fall within the notch.

--
John Honniball
[email-masked]