Quoting Jochen Kunz, who wrote on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 12:19:17PM +0100 ..
> On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:26:39 +0300
> Sergey Lapin <slapinid at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Exactly.  Even at the best of times this was basically junk, these
days it is probably worse than junk.  "SperrmÃŒll" ;-)

Wilko
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