History (1992): Native 5GB Into Exabyte Half-Height 8mm 5.25-Inch Tape Drive

The latest backup unit from Exabyte Corp. (Boulder, CO), the EXB-8505, is derived from the 8205 model to which has been added a second read/write head pair.

It can record approximately 10GB on an 8mm cartridge, but inserted in a half-height 5.25-inch SCSI-2 form factor device. Native capacity is 5GB and transfer rate is 500 KB/s, but they can be doubled on account of an integrated IDRC data compressor.

The announced MTBF of the drive is 80,000 hours combined with a bit error rate of 10¹⁷.

Unit price: $2,100 for a Q1,000 OEM order.

This device, available immediately, is already in IBM’s catalog for its AS/400s.

The Colorado firm is also announcing a 60-cartridge library (maximum capacity of 300GB without compression), the EXB- 60CHS, situated between a 10-media model (the EXB-10iS) and another for 116 (the EXB-120CHS). An average 16s is required to load a cartridge in one of the drives, plus an extra minute to find the file and read it.

The EXB-60CHS costs one third less than the EXB-120CHS and the first one is upgradable to obtain the second one for a final price 5 to 10% more than the EXB-120CHS.

Exabyte sold close to 2,200 libraries and 450,000 8mm drives.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠58, published on November 1992.