The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

Exabyte 8mm Tape Drive

In March 1987 I began testing the Exabyte 8mm tape unit. The second hand-built prototype drive ever built was given by the Exabyte Corporation to use for the original testing. This drive is physically about one half the size of a shoebox and consists of a stripped down Sony 8mm "Camcorder" deck (no Sony electronics or "video" is used). Onto this deck Exabyte built the electronics (all surface mount) which do direct digital reads/writes to/from the tape. The corporation spent about $15 million on development, and over 20,000 units have now been manufactured.

This drive uses a standard Sony P6-120MP two-hour 8mm VCR tape which may be purchased from local video stores for less than ten dollars. A single tape can hold more than 2.3 Gigabytes (that is more than 2,200,000 Kbytes or disk blocks). Another positive feature of the 8mm metal particle tapes is that they are highly resistant to "normal" magnetic fields (refrigerator magnets); although, they can be erased by very strong fields.

The ECN is evaluating Exabyte's tape drives for possible use as backup devices. An Exabyte writes 35 million bits per square inch of media. Experience has shown that 22-23 reels of conventional 1/2" magtape (6250 bits/inch) will fit on one Exabyte tape when used for system backups!

Currently 13 Exabyte drives are scattered around the ECN. EL and EN machines have been backed up daily to Exabytes for over a year now. During this period in addition to the regular 1/2" magtape backups, "practice" backups have been done on some Suns as well as EI, CN, GN and MN. If you want to see one of these drives or want more information, see George Goble in MSEE 104C.

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