Topic: Internal DAT drive?

[Genghis Cougar Mellen Khan]

Does anyone here have/use an internal DAT drive? Are any models able to rip audio tapes out of the box, or do they require special software or update the firmware etc. ? If so, what's should I expect to spend? I have a ton of DAT masters I'd like to rip and archive.

[Joe w.]

I don't know of any dds drives that read audio tapes. my drives certainly don't like them......but will read most dds, data tapes.

dat drives that read audio from dds tapes.
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/datfaq.htm

firmware flash instructions:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~heemsker/fup/

[Genghis Cougar Mellen Khan]

I don't know of any dds drives that read audio tapes. my drives certainly don't like them......but will read most dds, data tapes.

dat drives that read audio from dds tapes.
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/datfaq.htm

firmware flash instructions:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~heemsker/fup/

Thank Joe!

Maybe this is a stupid question, but what is there a difference between DDS and audio grade tapes other than length?

[Joe w.]

Actually a very good question. Here is a link for that:

http://www.tape.com/techinfo/ddsaudio.html

[chase]

as tempting as DDS drives appear to be, they are a royal PITA to get working.  i hope you are a very patient person.

[digitaltaper]

as tempting as DDS drives appear to be, they are a royal PITA to get working.  i hope you are a very patient person.

Very true ... but it you can get it working it is pretty sweet.  When my d7 died it cost me $30.00 to get a computer dat drive with all the cables/cards ... Much cheaper to listen and dump old DATS then a prodigital repair.  Jb3/Laptop only recording for me now.

[Leehro]

I didn't have any problems getting mine running.

just check ebay for a CTD-8000 (others work but this is what I got) and a scsi card (i have an adaptec 2930 that i bought years ago).  flash the firmware and you're done.

[janka]

I used a sony sdt-9000 with SGI 12.2 firmware and it worked great. It'll transfer at 2x speed using DAT2WAV. I only used it for a few DATs before begining to use an FR-2. It's now just sitting in a box in my closet 

[Genghis Cougar Mellen Khan]

I used a sony sdt-9000 with SGI 12.2 firmware and it worked great. It'll transfer at 2x speed using DAT2WAV. I only used it for a few DATs before begining to use an FR-2. It's now just sitting in a box in my closet 

Did you ever have success using it with non-data grade tapes? HHB, Quantegy etc... ?

[janka]

Never tried with anything other then DDS grade. I think as long as the tapes are encoded with a timecode they read fiine.

[tchoub]

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 !

[neutrino]

I'm curious if anyone knows any specifics regarding the error correction used by DDS drives. I have heard several people mention that they had been able to recover DATs which had digi-noise by reading the tape on a DDS drive. Are some of the DDS drives that much better in there error recovery? Or could they be dropping the samples which had errors and caused "audible" digi-noise. As others, I have almost 15 years of data masters to archive and going the DDS drive route seems very tempting.
dB-

[darkfunk]

After selling my DA-P1 I still needed a device to do transfers.  I bought a Archive 4320NT SCSI tape drive from someone on EBAY who had already installed the needed audio firmware.  Here are some observations:

1. I needed to get a scsi PCI adapter, which cost an extra 50
2. the transfers weren't all that fast - only about 2x
3. It is not a useful playback device - you can play tapes... but you can't fast forward or rewind.
4. it took alot of finagling to get it going.

About the only positive aspect of the experience was a brief sense of triumph when i finally got it working. 

Because of all of the above, I ended up replacing it w/ a fullsize tascam deck.  I am much happier being able to listen to tapes etc and i don't need fast transfers because I do them overnight on a timed record anyhow. 

[tchoub]

1. I needed to get a scsi PCI adapter, which cost an extra 50

You can find SCSI cards for far cheaper and you don't need an expensive one to use a SCSI DAT drive.

2. the transfers weren't all that fast - only about 2x

which is still better than 1x ...

3. It is not a useful playback device - you can play tapes... but you can't fast forward or rewind.

this is true but I'm not convinced that dat drives have been developed to listen to dat in your living room.

4. it took alot of finagling to get it going.
About the only positive aspect of the experience was a brief sense of triumph when i finally got it working. 

this is also true You can be proud of yourself when you manage to make a Seagate or Sony dat drive read/write audio

[tchoub]

I'm curious if anyone knows any specifics regarding the error correction used by DDS drives. I have heard several people mention that they had been able to recover DATs which had digi-noise by reading the tape on a DDS drive. Are some of the DDS drives that much better in there error recovery? Or could they be dropping the samples which had errors and caused "audible" digi-noise. As others, I have almost 15 years of data masters to archive and going the DDS drive route seems very tempting.
dB-

As far as I know, all DAT/DDS drives use functions to detect corrupted data and to correct them. There are different techniques available for both detection and correction.
DAT and DDS use both the double-encoded Reed-Solomon system based on a two-layered strategy in DAT drives (C1 and C2 ECC) and a three-layered one in DDS drives (C1, C2 and C3 ECC).
The DDS drives additionally use other correction techniques such as Read-After-Write (RAW) facility (which checks the data for errors immediately after it is written, and rewrites it if necessary), N-Group Writing, Data Randomiser and Checksums.
So, the DDS drives do not drop the corrupted samples but try to locate and to correct them more efficiently than DAT drives.
However, this error detection/correction works well until a certain point... I have audio tapes which are totally inaudible in my portable D8 and perfectly transfered with my Seagate drive while one of my audio tape which has few diginoises and dropouts in my portable D8 is unaplayable in my Seagate drive...

In my opinion, DDS drives are worth a try.

Edited for clarity...