March | 2017 | Owen's Tech

Just to answer everyone “Burning Questions”, yes I do want a cassette deck. Anyway, when I was looking though pictures from estate sales with boring and ugly chairs and vases, I spotted a picture of something I believed to be a cassette deck. When I went to check what it was, I was happy to see it was a cassette deck. And a beautiful one too. Even though it has a weird cassette mechanism, it met all my criteria. It has the silver 70’s look with woodgrain I love, it has two nice analog decibel meters, and it’s Pioneer. To top it all off it was only $12.

So I’m sure you know now that I bought it and sure enough, I did. When I hooked it up to my stereo, I noticed it had a large “discharge sound” that kind of sounded like a slowed down pop. It would play cassettes, but it sounded awful and scared my dog. So I went to check the insides for my first guess, which was bad capacitors. Sadly, that was not the case. Since I had no clue what might be going on, I just turned it off. Later I turned it back on for fun, and realized that the pops mysteriously disappeared. Have you ever seen things fix themselves? I have at least several times. It hasn’t given me any trouble since. I still need to replace the belts, but it was only $12 so I’m very happy with it.

The front of the cassette deck.

The nice dB/VU meters.

A look inside the strange cassette mechanism.

I copied in the instruction manual, if anyone wants to see it: Instructions

I’m sure many of you remember my post called “The Tape Library Salvage Score!” (if you don’t, just scroll down the home page and you’ll see it). Anyway, In that post I talked about how I got 2 LTO Ultrium tape drives, a LTO 3 drive and a LTO 4 drive. The LTO 3 drive was broken and had the orange cleaning tape shown above stuck in it. I have taken apart and salvaged the LTO 3 drive, but I still have the working LTO 4 drive. For a while now I have wanted to back up my servers (I say this like I have many servers, but the truth is I only have two) on tape. The problem is my tape drive has SFP ports (read up!) on the back, limiting my options to doing an optical connection to my server, or just using an SFP cable. Sadly, as far as I know no servers or computers come with SFP or optical ports on the back, meaning you need to get a SFP/optical card for your server. Let me tell you, those are WAY overpriced for what they are. I’m never going to spend $300 on a little circuit board that will go in the back of my server. Since I had 5 boxed tapes and a drive, I tried (with no success) to sell them on eBay. to so I could get a couple hundred dollars (yeah, that much. Tape media is way overpriced) I could spend on something else.

Later my dad (he works in the IT department of a architecture firm) got the news that he and his other employees had to move out of there private room and go to some office cubicles in an old meeting area. Since they were downsizing, they need to get rid of a lot of stuff. And yes, this is the place I got the tape library. It just happened to be that they had a optical card sitting around that they were getting rid of. So he brought that home, and I shoved it into my server, took the tape drive and tapes out of their sad bubble-wrapped box, ripped off the “Thank you for purchasing” eBay stickers and ran downstairs with them. I did have to downgrade my server from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2008 Standard for it to work, but it worked. I could finally back up my stuff to tape. I will also build a case for the tape drive, because it’s an internal drive and has all it’s parts exposed. Also I have to have a whole separate ATX power supply to run it.