If the Plague Were Magnetic Media: The Sony AIT i50/S Tape Drive

As a public service, I feel compelled to warn you to stay away from the Sony AIT i50/S tape drive. Despite the warm reviews that CNET is sharing from various retailers (who are no doubt greatly interested in getting these flaming pieces of shit out of their warehouses as quickly as possible), I can tell you first hand that the Sony AIT i50/S is the shittiest shit that has ever been shat.

I had a little trouble getting the SCSI device to play nice on a Windows server: this is not the drive's fault, and does not diminish my opinion of it. After puzzling out which jumpers on the back of the device stayed and which had to go, I was set.

My problems with the Sony AIT i50/S (the 'S' stands for "Shitty") began as soon as I took it out of the box. It was black. That's OK: I knew this when I ordered it from CDW. (CDW, by the way, has failed to return my calls when I complained of being sent NetGEAR DS104 hubs — plural — that failed to play nice with BeOS. They also failed to warn me that I was buying a shitty tape drive. I think I hate them.) The server intended to receive this shitty Sony AIT i50/S was a typical beige tower, so I proceeded to attempt, miserably, to remove the black faceplate. This involved, if memory serves me correctly, about six screws concealed in the most obscure of places on three sides of a six-sided drive, some so tiny as to be better suited in a wristwatch.

Crack. One of the little plastic hooks on the black faceplate snapped off. I'd missed one of the screws. Looks like I'm stuck with beige forever now.

After carefully (so very carefully) turning the drive beige-colored, which required three separate pieces (all provided in the box) I installed the drive and dicked around with SCSI settings. I popped a tape in and began setting up a rudimentary backup schedule in ntbackup. Everything seemed OK. I walked off. Boy, was I in for a surprise.

When it was time to eject the tape, I did what any sysadmin who desires to eject a tape would do. I found the appropriate media in compmgmt.msc and clicked "Eject". Whir, whir, whir went the drive. Flash, flash, flash went the light on the front of the Sony AIT i50/S (the 'S' might stand for "Stall out completely"). Eventually, Windows threw an error.

About ten minutes of troubleshooting later, I arrived at a harrowing conclusion. The Sony AIT i50/S was correctly unmounting and ejecting the tape. But guess what? The door was stuck. I could see it bending outward from the pressure of a tape pushing against it. Only by lifting the door up with a finger could I reliably get the Sony AIT i50/S motherfucking tape drive to spit out its tapes.

Fuck this shit, I thought. "Fuck this shit," I said out loud to no one other than the other boxes in the server room. Out came the Leatherman. Rip, rip, rip went the plastic as I forced the door off its hinges and into the trashcan. My crudely implemented Cesarian section freed the imprisoned tape. But the damn drive now looked ugly: like a pissed off sysadmin had taken out some rage on it almost. I fumbled through the leftover pieces that came with the drive. There was a dorky little plastic guard that seemed to snap onto the front of the faceplate to protect the tapes. "Why would you need something like a sneeze guard on a tape drive when it already has a spring-loaded door mechanism?" I asked myself the day I installed it. Now I knew. That dorky sneeze guard was the only thing Sony knew would actually still be working on the machine after the first day. And only then because it is physically impossible for Sony Corporation to fuck up the attractive nature of the tiny magnetic lock on the sneeze guard. (I have reservations about putting a magnet of any sort that close to a goddamn tape drive, but hey: it's either this or risk getting lint, hair, and tobacco juice inside that thing.)

After forcibly ripping entire pieces of the tape drive's exterior off and throwing them in the garbage (where they belong, I might add), I finally had a tape drive that worked.

The Sony AIT i50/S seems to write bits to a tape OK, though I have yet to go through an actual restoration procedure with them. So we'll see if they hold up. Cosmetically, the Sony AIT i50/S is shitty. It has a terrible assembly and is just plain borked, through and through. If you want a cheap SCSI tape drive, I would recommend it only to a masochist who desires pain, unnecessary suffering, and a crude backup strategy.