After 6 years and one day of reliable services my Sony SDT-9000 DAT streamer broke down. It started acting up last Saturday and refused to recognize two of my tapes. I used two new tapes and managed to backup my server to the tape drive one last time.
Today the streamer didn’t recognize any tapes again, not even the two tapes which worked last week. I tried using a cleaning tape but it didn’t help. After I powercycled my server the streamer wasn’t even detected any more. Another powercycle brought it back but it still wouldn’t accept any tapes. I finally gave up and removed the streamer and the SCSI hostadapter from my server.
I’ve considered buying a new DAT streamer but decided against that option. An external harddisk offers better performance and price than a tape drive these days. So I will use my external USB 2.0 harddisk for the time being.