8mm tape drives: anything over 5GB?

[Mntsnow]

Lazydawg, Well when you say 8mm you are really talking about just a tape size as there is several technologies in place that use that size of tape but have totally different hardware and usages with capacitys that are upto the 40 gig mark using the "Mammoth" technology. And very shortly the "Mammoth-2" hardware will be avaliable to everyone with capacitys reaching upto 100 gigs if my memory serves me right. So 8mm is not a dead size it's just the technology is evolving http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[lazydawg]

I managed to get my hands on a bunch of older Sony 8mm data tapes. Now I find out that nobody I know has an 8mm Video Camera so I thought maybe I'd look around for a tape drive for the computer. My quick look didn't turn up anything that could do over 5GB per tape. Since my current system has a 10GD HD, and future system will easily have 40+GB drives, it seems 5GB backups aren't worth it. Is there anything bigger out there for 8mm? If not, why?

Seems to me the industry in general doesn't like "old" technology. Imagine the capacity a half height 5.25 HD could give you today (easily 100+GB), but everybody wants 3.5 inch drives. Seems 5.25 would fit in every computer I've ever seen. Same with tapes. I'm sure when they switched to 4mm DAT tapes the 8mm could have gotten over 2x more data using the "same" technology, but then you couldn't charge twice as much for the tape could you? Just me ranting, sorry.