History (1988): 4mm Helical Scan Recording Drives Arriving

Right after Gigatape GmbH (Puchheim, West Germany) and Sony, joining Hewlett-Packard on this matter, there are newcomers in 4mm Data-DAT, a tiny 1.3GB magnetic tape cartridge.

HP StorageWorks DAT 72 USB

Hitachi, Maxell, Mitsumi, Mountain, TDK, and Wangtek (with JVC) showed drives or media for these magnetic tapes using helical scan recording at 10th Comdex on November 14-18 in Las Vegas, NV.

The trouble with these companies is to agree on the standardization for this support that has to be interchangeable to succeed.

Exabyte is the first to present an automatic helical scan tape access library based on Sony’s 8mm cartridge with a maximum capacity of 560GB.

Conventional longitudinal recording tapes are still on the go.

Several companies can store now 150-inch tape: Archive, Caliper, Cipher, Tandberg Data.

Wangtek even announced 500MB on an extended length cartridge.

The other favorite support is the IBM 3480 cartridge.

Fujitsu’s new drive, based on this media, is a rack-mountable half-inch magnetic tape unit.

Caliper’s drive, a 5.25-inch form factor, allows respectively 360 or 720MB on 24 or 48 serpentine tracks.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠11, volume ≠1, published on November 1988.