Tape Storage


HP C1533A DDS/2 Tape Drive


HP C1557A DDS/3 Tape Drive Changer


Exabyte 8mm Helical Scan Tape Drive


Wangtec QIC Tape Drives


Archive QIC Tape Drives


DLT / LTO / Ultrium

DLT -- Digital Linear Tape.

LTO -- Linear Tape-Open. Basically the 2nd generation DLT taken to higher capacities.

The classic 1/2" mag tape format lives on in these beasts. They are probably the highest storage capacity drive on the market, matched in capacity to the modern Terabyte Disks -- 1 Disk, 1 Tape. The cost is appropriately high too, unfortunately.

1/2" tape format in a single-reel cartridge. The 2nd reel is in the tape drive. THis makes the format great for tape libraries: high storage densities and easy to grab tapes.

There was a second physical format (also something -ium) that had two reels in a cartridge, but it failed.

The write format is a Helical track written one one side, with passes back and forth (end to end) along the tape. This is similar to the multi-track format of QIC, but helical instead of linear heads. A second timing track is written on the back side of the tape so that data can be picked up from the data side.

Each tape cartridge is chipped with a NVRAM which records the locations of the files on the tape for quick seek access.

Transfer Rates Compressed (Drive Rate 1/2 of stated)


DLT Types

AIT


DAT / DDS Tapes

DDS Digital Data Storage using DAT Digital Audio Tape format.

MRS is the Media Recognition System which allows drives to determine what kind of tape is loaded into them. It is implemnted with stripes on the leader of the tape.

8mm Tapes

QIC Tapes


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Last Modified: Mon Feb 21 13:13:21 CST 2011
Bolo (Josef Burger) <bolo@cs.wisc.edu>