S159 Cartridge tape

[Carl S. Gutekunst]

In article <459 at Terra.cc.brunel.ac.uk> linda at cc.brunel.ac.uk (Linda Birmingham) writes:
>Has anyone used the S159 8mm Cartridge Tape subsystem on Pyramids ?

I don't know what people in the field have been doing, but here we've been
experimenting with them in the lab. (Not me -- someone else. So everything I
am writing here is hearsay, third hand, twice removed.)

For those who aren't familiar with the technology, these are 2 GByte digital
tape drives, using conventional 8mm video tape. I forget who we bought ours
from, but all the drives are made by Sony so it makes little difference who
the intermediate vendor is. 

While these drives are interesting, they are hardly a panacea. The big problem
is reliability. The drives are rated at "10,000 hours, 10% duty cycle," which
means that to achieve a 10,000 hour life you cannot use the drive more than 2
hours and 2 minutes per day. That's a little more than a gigabyte per day. If
you have more than that, the drive will wear out sooner. Sure enough, when we
ran the drives continuously, they died consistently in about two months.

Probably to most important factor, though, is that Sony is telling systems
manufacturers to wait for digital DAT drives. These will be "only" 1.2 GB per
tape, but will be industrial quality and a lot faster.

<csg>