This is a bit dated, but thought I'd add a few things just in case someone else is in the same boat.
I would second looking for a good, studio-grade unit like a R500 - make sure it either has a low hours count or was serviced. That's probably going to be your best bet these days since this equipment is not getting any younger.
A long shot, but in my mind a better option, is to find one of the old audio-capable computer DAT drives that was available back in the 90s. Seagate/Connor and SGI made these drives to connect to a SCSI interface, and the advantage is that they run transfers faster than real-time (not quite double speed). To my knowledge, theses were the only drives that would work, as others had the audio capability disabled (because we all know DAT copying and piracy was a huge issue). If you can find one of these drives, and get a working SCSI card, you can get a program called DAT2WAV from here
http://web.ncf.ca/aa571/dat2wav.htm. Run it from DOS, and you end up with nice, neat wav files based on the track markers on the DAT. I transferred about 300 DATs this way from mine and a friend's collections. Anything that had too many errors for this approach got a manual play in an R500 to see if it was actually listenable and a digital transfer (maybe 10 of them).
Hope that helps.