there are a number of third party 9track drives out there, the name that
comes to mind as either most commonly mentioned or most popular is 
Cipher. 
the DEC transports are the TU80,TU78, TU81, and pals. Note that there are 
two major densities of tape: 1600 bpi, (the TU80 is a 1600 bpi drive), 
and 6250 bpi. naturally you want a drive that can do both. the TU81 is a 
nice drive, it is not too big (my TU78 is taller than me and is _liquid 
cooled_ and consumes over 3 kilowatts! looks cool but you dont want to run
it! (i dont run mine! (btw: free TU78 to a good home, you haul it from
pittsburgh, PA!))) , there were many models of ciphers but ht eones i 
remember were small units, about the size of an RA81 or so. 

unless you have old tapes to read or you _really_ want a blast from the 
past, i wouldnt bother with 9tracks. You can barely put 50 megs on a 
reel. It looks very impressive, but the tape is _not_ cheap, and it is
laborious to load and unload with many drives, and for that capacity,
you could easily fill a room with tapes. i'd find a smaller kind of tape. 
Personally i'm fond of 4mm DATs, especially good ol'fashioned DDS1's, 
largely because theyre dirt cheap and quie reliable. The best DDS1 drives
ive seen are archive pythons and, naturally, DEC drives. The TZ85 is a
great little indestructible tape unit. plus, since everybody's buying DDS2
or DDS3's these days, the drives are cheap and the tapes can be had for 
2-5 dollars new. 

good quality 9track is very reliable, provided you treat trhe tape nice 
mechanically (i.e. be carefu loading it), but you cant store much useful 
on a tape that small these days.. even older VAXen can sport a lot of
storage these days (the two KA650 machine i run has 4 and 12 gigs of disk
respectively, for example) 


 just my $.02
isildur

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Gunther Schadow wrote:
> Finally, we do have some reel tape lying around my office and
> I'd like to use it. What kind of reel tape drive is usually used
> with VAX 6000s, how connected? Is it worthwile or are those bad
> and flaky? How much capacity does such a reel have? I have never 
> seen any of those drives on eBay in the last 3 months or so that I'm 
> watching this.