I have both a Seagate CTD 8000 and a Sony SDT 9000 drive.
They both work fine with DDS and DAT tapes under linux.
The Sony drive is, in my opinion, much more harder to use (under linux) than the Seagate drive...
Furthermore, the Sony drive seems to be very sensitive (sensible ?) to errors : if I read a dat tape full of diginoise, my Seagate drive generates a .wav file without diginoises while the Sony generates one full of diginoise.
However, my Sony drive does not automatically rewind tapes when inserting/ejecting a tape while the Seagate does (this can be an interesting point for those who use 90m dds tapes and record several shows on the same tape).
So, in my opinion, for those who use their drives under linux, the Seagate drive is the best for DAT>wav while the Sony drive is the best for wav>DAT.
By the way, I get > x3 transfer speed with the Sony drive using wdat or read_dat.
Finally, to answer the initial question of 'Genghis Cougar Mellen Khan', most of the drives will need to be flashed to read audio (except the SGI versions of the Sony SDT 9000 drive) and several softwares are available under each operating system to deal with audio.
Hope this helps !