On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Wilko Bulte wrote: > 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 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" ;-) 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. _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs