21 Jan
2010
21 Jan
'10
1:07 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Wilko Bulte <wb(a)freebie.xs4all.nl> wrote:
Quoting Jochen Kunz, who wrote on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at
12:19:17PM +0100 ..
Ah, that's so bad, so I will really need to buy some vintage SCSI tape drive
to fullfill my backup needs. I see the reason why these devices are
nowhere to be found.
S.
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On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:26:39 +0300
Sergey Lapin <slapinid(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Exactly. Even at the best of times this was basically junk, these
days it is probably worse than junk. "SperrmÃŒll" ;-) And I've got a strange device I've seen
nowhere else - floppy-attached
tape drive, labelled Irwin, model 285.
[...]
Also - how wide these devices were used?
I've never met one before
while I can't say I have little IT experience.
Floppy tapes where quite
common consumer grade (i.e. cheap crap) backup
drives in the early 90'is. They just mimic a floppy drive to the
controler. But you need special software to actually use the drive.
They don't work like a big floppy.
Don't waste your time with this crap. Floppy streamers are sslllooowww
and unreliable. They are limited to the data rate of a floppy drive,
IIRC 500 kBit/s max. and the tapes need to be formated before use. They
have no "read after write" verify. So you need an extra verify run
after the backup was written. I.e. you need to run the whole tape three
times through the drive. This can take up to several hours.
The only reason to resurrect one of these drives is to read old tapes
with important data that would be lost otherwise.