I would have to agree with those who have begged to differ with my
earlier post.  I made my comments before seeing postings about
unreadable tapes, and was responding to the "wear and tear on the
drives" issue.

By the way, we installed DDS2 drives many moons ago, used 90-meter
tapes for a while, then switched to 120-meter tapes.  A couple of the
drives failed, were replaced, and have been working fine ever since.
This reminds me of the caveat we used to receive on reel-to-reel drives
to the effect that using 3600-foot reels should not be attempted unless
we intended to use only 3600-foot reels on that drive.  Evidently the
difference in the two types of media caused different wear patterns,
different calibration, or something.

>>> "Gary L. Paveza, Jr." <[log in to unmask]> 03/05/98 02:53pm
>>>
You wrote:
>
>Never heard anything of the sort.  Besides, if you are using media
>approved by the mfr and have a support agreement, who cares?
>

Hmm..I would guess that the person responsible for maintaining the
backup integrity would care.  Especially if backups were either not
being done, or if they were done with errors on them.