I missd that, Who was looking for writeline tape seals?
I currently have several hundred along with several wrightlint tape racks I plan to put on
ebay next week fro
a friend.
Feel free to contact me directly if you or anyone has a need. I threw out close to 1,000 9
track tapes with
seals last week.
THe other Bob
On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:23:14 -0400, Tim Shoppa wrote:
Al made a comment about looking for Wright Line tape
seals.
A story of mine:
In the 90's I got to spend a lot of time sitting in
tape libraries
filled with tens of thousands of tapes hanging on racks from the
hook on the tape seal.
During a typical stretch (say 8 hours nominal) one or
two
tape seals would break and the tape would get dumped
to the floor. Sometimes the seal would break in response
to some kind of vibration in the room (after all, there were
several tape drives getting loaded/unloaded etc. as
well as me rummaging through the racks looking for tapes) but
other times they seemed to break with absolutely no reason.
Sometimes the black plastic hanger would break but
more
typically the white plastic seal would break near the hanger.
I'd say from this that out of a library of 30,000
tapes
with several tape seals breaking every day, that the expected
MTBF of those Wright-line tape seal is probably 30 years.
That's not necessarily the same as lifetime. As the
plasticizers
dry out I'd expect them to break more often. Sunlight and ozone+
heat can really do a doozy on plastics.
The hard-plastic IBM tape seals seemed to be very much
more vulnerable to breaking in transport than the Wright
lines, and they'd also occasionally fail just hanging there on
the tape rack, but I'm reluctant to make any statistical
statements about them because so many were obviously
broken in transport.