tape drives

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Sat May 19 06:36:18 2001

At 06:32 PM 5/18/01 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
>But if you don't have automatic fast forward (and some way to judge the
>approximate postiion of the tape automatically), then finding a
>particular file is consists of rewinding the tape to the start and then
>reading the tape (at normal speed) until you find the file you want.
>Which, using one side of a C90 cassette, could take 45 minutes. This is
>going to get boring fast.

You've got to get out of basement more often, Tony. :-) Why, just
yesterday afternoon I made several hundred dollars babysitting someone's
WinNT box, coaxing its 5-gig Travan cart tape backup unit to
retrieve one 13K file, and that took about three hours total
to find the two tapes, read the catalog from the tapes, then
get the file. Fortunately, there were other things to fix
around that office. The 1200 baud speed of the 1541 drive
did cross my mind as I waited.

- John
Received on Sat May 19 2001 - 06:36:18 BST