19 Jan
2017
19 Jan
'17
8:42 p.m.
On 01/19/2017 08:12 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
On 01/19/2017 12:46 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I'm familiar with the CDC air-bearing hubs, having cut my magtape teeth
many years ago on CDC 607 drives, then the 657/659 somewhat inferior
ones, then eventually the 66x autoloaders. I'll agree that the system
is very good, particularly in the case of vacuum-column drives.
But I haven't seen any Keystone drives for sale lately. Pity that.
--Chuck
A streamer with big powerful reel servos makes me
a bit nervous in
those cases. After all, the design goal there is speed, not
gentleness.
The CDC Keystone (92181 and 92185) drives have air bearing hubs that
sense tape tension by how tightly the tape is pulled over the
bearing. So, the ONLY thing that actually touches the data surface of
the tape is the head and the cleaner blade. Still, on deteriorated
tapes, it starts getting pretty bad. On good tapes from my archive,
it just takes a cleaning of the head after every reel.