27 May
2006
27 May
'06
7:39 p.m.
The "25 worst" list made me remember the Pereos tape drive--backed up about
1 GB (compressed) onto tiny postage-stamp sized tapes.
Here's one cheap on e-Pay:
http://tinyurl.com/pczbk
I first saw one of these things in 1994, when I was contacted by the
company to include support for the thing in one of our forensics products.
After 2 weeks of struggling to get it working so that I could actually read
tapes that were written by it at least some of the time, I sent the sample
unit back with a polite refusal.
For those collecting oddball vintage media, this definitely fits the bill.
One couldn't go to, say, Fry's and buy tapes for it either--you had to call
an 800 number and wait for Fedex to deliver them.
I think Datasonix sold these units up until about 1998.
Cheers,
Chuck
28 May
28 May
3:44 a.m.
New subject: [ZS1] Bad ideas, cont'd; the Pereos tape drive
From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
The "25 worst" list made me remember the
Pereos tape drive--backed up
about
1 GB (compressed) onto tiny postage-stamp sized
tapes.
The worst one I remember, is the BackPack QIC-80 drive from MicroSolutions.
Our Tax authorities wanted to invest in these drives, because the were so
cheap, and many used them. I told them outright, that my experience with
those drives had been bad, and that wouldnt sell them to anyone, so if they
wanted them desperately, they would have to go somewhere else.
Nico
7:20 a.m.
New subject: [ZS1] Bad ideas, cont'd; the Pereos tape drive
On 5/28/2006 at 5:44 AM Nico de Jong wrote:
The worst one I remember, is the BackPack QIC-80 drive
from
MicroSolutions.
Our Tax authorities wanted to invest in these drives,
because the were so
cheap, and many used them. I told them outright, that my experience with
those drives had been bad, and that wouldnt sell them to anyone, so if
they
wanted them desperately, they would have to go
somewhere else.
Our tax folks invested at various times in Bernouilli drives (150 aand 250
MB), DDS, 8mm and DLT and MO (4.6 GB Apex drives) and then just went to
large hard drives for backup. They actually bought about 150 of the
Pereos units and never used them AFAIK. Maybe they've already shown up on
DoveBid. Didn't HP at some point, offer a Travan solution that featured
read-after write?
I got the rah-rah routine from a very high corporate officer of Datasonix
(he's still around, so I won't name-drop) that they'd solved all of the
problems with tape and then some. The tapes were all of 2.5 mm in width
and were helically-scanned, just like videotape--the transport was made by
Sony.. When I asked if tape stretching wasn't going to be a problem, he
made an allusion to embedded servo techniques. But no read-after-write, so
you got to discover the bad news only if you went back and verified your
backup.
Actually, given the whole "floppy-tape" scene, I'm amazed that more folks
didn't set their PeeCees on fire and throw them out of a third-story
window. It would take you somewhere around 5-6 hours to back up a 1 GB
drive with the Pereos--and that assumed a good tape, which was rare.
As far as I know, Sony itself never deployed the technology on so much as
an audio note-taking system.
And folks are still not backing things up. Our local hospital here
recently lost about 5000 images on their GE Xray machine. It's served by a
RAID arrary, but that doesn't protect from software gone bad. So they were
contacting folks to come back in and get new pictures taken.
Cheers,
Chuck
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cclist＠sydex.com -
nico＠farumdata.dk