This document is currently under construction.

DATA LIBRARY-- TAPE MEDIA AT SRC

Select a media if you wish to ZOOM directly to the relevant tape device information

[ 9-Track ] [ 4mm DAT ] [ 8mm Exabyte ] [ Cartridge ] [ CD-ROM ]

Whether you are a new user or an old-hand, chances are that you will use tape at some point during your computing career here. "Tape" is an offline storage media used to transfer data between institutions or to backup your important files.

WHAT KIND OF TAPE?

We currently support four types of tape media which (in theory) can be purchased from the UC bookstore:

1/2", 9-Track Tape.
This is the "traditional" reel-to-reel tape. Standard tapes--2400', 6250 bpi --can hold 170 MB of data. Unless you need to transfer data to/from a mainframe computer, we don't recommend this tape media as it is RAPIDLY becoming obsolete.

4 mm, Digital Audio Tape (DAT).
This helical scan, data cartridge is the most commonly used media by our user community. Ninety (90) meter DATs can hold 1.2-2 gigabytes (1,200-2,000 MB) of data.

8 mm, Exabyte Tape.
This media is relatively new to SRC. The standard 112 meter tape can hold 2.5 GB of data and upwards of 10 GB using compression.

Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC).
These cartridge tapes can store up to 150 MB.
How to Access the Tape Drives.

To access your tape, you must reference a "device" which for all intents and purposes looks like a very long UNIX path name. Below are the device names and device types on our UNIX systems. There are two device names per machine/media pair (the first one listed is the "rewinding" device name, the second is "non-rewinding". Note that you must have an account on the machine where the device is located in order to use it. For example, you will not be able to use the DAT drive on Oedipus unless you have an account on Oedipus!

TAPE DEVICES

Updated: 17JAN96