I've got an Alesis SR18. I like the drum sounds, but I never had the patience to do any programming of it. It does have some usable patterns. I used it with my Yamaha AW1600 years ago to do a version of Inner City Blues with only factory patterns.
You can also feed it midi tracks from a computer and feed that to your 8 track.
I've since moved to MT Power Drumkit in my DAW, although you could send the audio output from your computer to your recorder.