On Tue, 07 Aug 2018 17:33:18 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2018-08-07, Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>> The cartridges are 102.0 × 105.4 × 21.5 mm × 21.5 mm containing 1/2"
>> tape. The latest spec (LTO-8) stores 12TB in each cartridge.
>
> A 4-dimensional cartridge?  No wonder they hold so much data.  :-)
>
I wish. Periodically the Pan/XFCE/Fedora combo screws up ^C paste
operations by pasting somewhere I didn't intend. This was one of them...

>> Bit of a change from the old ICL drives which, IIRC held about 8 MB per
>> reel.
>
> Depends on block size.  Short blocks mean that the 0.6-inch inter-record
> gaps are longer than the data blocks themselves.  But if you used a
> decent block size (e.g. 4K) you could get about 20 MB on a 2400-foot
> reel at 800 bpi.  Newer, higher-density drives could do even better.
>
Yeah, that was a guess and I don't remember the actual capacities except
that real tapes held a lot more than George 3 emulated tapes (245 Kword
IIRC). Not that that prevented one idiot G3 site I knew from using one of
the old ICL tape sorts with emulated worktapes to sort quite large
production workloads when there was a good, fast disk sort available.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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