History (1989): Honeywell and DigiData Persists With VHS Library

In the helical scan recording segment, 4mm and 8mm formats seem promised to a greater future than the much larger VHS format.

This doesn’t stop two firms, Honeywell and DigiData, of keeping up with large VHS cassettes for backup.

DigiData VHS tape device

Honeywell’s Test Instruments Division of USA has just launched an automatic 4TB library, based on a 600 VHS video cassette robot manufactured by Asaca (Tokyo, Japan).

In the worst case, loading time for a cassette is 16s. Each library can hold 2 to 5 drives. Honeywell’s Very Large Archive model 600, will cost at least a half million dollar, it will work on Ethernet network at a transfer rate of 4MBs/s.

VHS cassettes are erasable, but Honeywell has deliberately chosen to use them as a write-once type of support only, just like WORM disks.

The US company is mainly trying to place its new library for archival data applications.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠19/20, published on August/September 1989.