[TUHS] Irwin 285

[Jochen Kunz]

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.
-- 


tschüß,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

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