# Tape Drives



## getopt (Jun 23, 2019)

For what reasons are you still running legacy tape drives? 
What product/interface/media have survived?


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jun 23, 2019)

Tape Storage Solutions | IBM
					

Discover reliable tape storage technology with airgap, long-term retention, cyber resilient and energy-efficient at a lower cost than other media.



					www.ibm.com


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jun 23, 2019)

getopt said:


> OJ
> I hoped to get some personal experience instead of goggled links.


I misread your question, sorry.  My link is not even for legacy drives since IBM tape tech is very current.


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## ralphbsz (Jun 24, 2019)

Personally? At home?

I still have two Exabyte 8mm tapes (one 2.5gig, one 5gig), and one Digital cartridge drive (I think it is called TK-something). All connected via 50-pin SCSI. I think all the TK cartridges were copied to disk about 10 years ago. The last time I turned on the Exabyte was perhaps 5 years ago, to read one tape; took all afternoon, but eventually worked. I don't even remember what machine I used for this; probably not *BSD, since I've never had BSD on a machine with a slot for a SCSI controller. Most likely it was some Linux flavor.

I know that there are about 50 or 100 8mm tapes at home that have not been copied to disk yet, but I very much doubt that they will ever be read, because they are not backups of file systems; they are scientific data from a long-ago experiment, which will never be re-analyzed again.

Professionally? I've worked for large computer companies for the last 25 years all so. All of them use tapes heavily, some of them even build tapes. Matter-of-fact, quite a few of the folks at IBM research who do the R&D on tape heads are friends of mine; I used to work one hallway down the building from them. About 10 years ago, I got a patent for a bizarre little improvement in tape technology, working with another person from the same department that does tape head R&D.

In spite of rumors to the contrary, tape is NOT dead. It may be shrinking, and it might die in 10 or 100 years. Or perhaps 1000.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Jul 12, 2019)

getopt said:


> For what reasons are you still running legacy tape drives?
> What product/interface/media have survived?


I am running LTO6 drives in a Dell TL4000 (IBM TS3200) 48-slot library*. I have 384TB of disk here** (only about 1/3 full) and even with multiple GigE Intenet connections, cloud is not an option (for both speed and cost) and a robotic library will load the next tape unattended, while swapping drives would be a manual process and much more expensive.

* See RAIDzilla 2.5 - Replication and backups
** At home. Really


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