I was successful with a Radio Shack VHS tape eraser on floppy disks.  Should handle 8mm and DDS as well as VHS.  No guarantee of the quality of the wipe as far as data recovery on the tapes because I never had a drive working long enough to test at home.  Got DDS2 and exabyte jukeboxes but the drives crapped out.

Bill

William Pechter

From: TUHS <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org> on behalf of Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2019 10:34:05 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Someone wants to use an exabyte [ really bulk erasing ]
 
Dave Horsfall writes:
> On Mon, 25 Nov 2019, George Michaelson wrote:
>
> > I just failed with a Sun DAT drive. Cable and card bought online,
> > recognized by the mt command, but all it does is eject tapes.
>
> They're worse than 9-track tapes, and that's saying something :-)
>
> Oh, if you must use one, make sure to use data-quality tapes, not the
> cheaper media.
>
> -- Dave

I have several generations of these too.  I also have several crates of
9-track tapes, QIC-24 tapes, QIC-150 tapes, and various generations of
DDS DAT tapes.  I don't think that I have anything worth keeping on these
as I've transfered worthwhile stuff to newer media over time.  Hard to
believe that the entire contents of a 9-track tape fit in a negligible
amount of memory these days.

The thing that's kept me from getting these out of my basement is that
I'd prefer to erase them first, just in case.  Does anybody have experience
with a decent bulk tape eraser?

Jon