<span id="retro_color">[ Retro Scan of the Week ]</span> Datasafe Tape Drive

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Datasafe Tape Drive

March 14th, 2011 by Benj Edwards

“…standard 1/4″ tape on a self-threading 2.2″ spool.”

[ From Byte Magazine, April 1985, p.35 ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever installed a backup tape drive on your PC? Tell us about it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 10:42 am and is filed under Computer History, Regular Features, Retro Scan of the Week, Vintage Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Jurgi Says:
March 14th, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Nope, but regarding to low reliability of CDs and 3,5″ floppies, I considered using 5,25 low density floppies for document backup. Because even noname 360 KB disks saved on early ninetys still works perfectly. 😉
jdiwnab Says:
March 16th, 2011 at 10:34 pm
Not in a personal computer, but I ran setup some servers for a while that would go out to retail locations. These would have two tape drives. We’d have to keep tabs on how old each location’s tapes where and make sure people locally changed them out every day, and order new ones.

Tape drives have an unfortunate problem in that the tape can rub off in the drive. This gives the tapes a limited life span, and can cause lots of random errors in the drive until you run a cleaning tape through it. Eventually, even that won’t work and a new drive is needed.

So, yeah. I was the lowly intern that checked up on everyone’s backup and had to call everybody and ask how old their tapes where….
Chris Says:
March 23rd, 2011 at 9:43 am
I had a hand-me down Sun SCSI DAT-8 tape drive.

The thing was horribly slow, and I can’t remember being able to restore a single tape, ever, without corrupted data.