History (1993): DDF Pertec, Only European Manufacturer of Reel-to-Reel Tape Drives

For this company, magnetic tapes still have a great future. The small French firm has a large project for a 3480 type tape drive with a multi-gigabyte capacity.

The amount of half-inch reel-to reel tape drive manufacturers is limited (see box) and there are only 2 of them in Europe: M4 Data in UK and DDF Pertec (Cholet, France). It’s not like we could have thought, there still is a market for this type of product.

DDF reel-to-reel tape drive

DDF factory

DDF ships 10,000 to 20,000 of them per year to one unique segment, highly specialized, the telephone exchange network for telecommunication companies.

“This should be a market that will last until the end of the century,” even adds Andre Pouget-Abadie, GM, DDF Pertec.

He explains that these tapes are mostly used in telephone exchange networks to backup bills, and that, for exchange needs, tapes are not about to be given up.

Its main customers are: Alcatel, that counts for one quarter of its sales, Nokia and Samsung.

In its fiscal year ending April 30, 1993, DDF, the French private company, with 57 employees, tables on FF62 million sales, with a net income over FF5 million. Last year, sales had reached FF45 million with FF1.5 to FF2 million profits.

In addition to its tape drives, the firm manufactures RAM disks with SMD interfaces, they are emulators of old magnetic disk drives with fixed heads that no longer exist since the Winchester technology took the lead.

A former DDC Pertec subsidiary, DDF (Digital Development France) first was in 1978 a subsidiary of DDC, a US company that manufactured fixed-head disk drives (one magnetic head per track instead of a moving actuator). And since they were mostly sold to the public service, the French administration required for manufacturing to be located in France, this was done until 1987, before this activity stopped. To replace it, DCC developed emulators for these disks in RAM technology that DDF still manufactures. It’s the MSED unit (FF50,000 to FF100,000).

At the beginning of the 80’s, Alain Bouttier, who managed DDF at its beginning, got the idea to manufacture half-inch reel-to-reel tape drives, once again for the same market, telecommunications. Their marketing success is continuing, even if they are limited to 800, 1,600 and 3,200 bpi densities. The product in a start-stop mode is named Bandstor 2000 (800/1,600 bpi) and costs about FF30,000 in OEM 500. The FS3000 is a unit in streaming mode (800/1,600/3,200 bpi) that costs FF20,000 in the same conditions.

In 1986, the US head company DDC bought over the Pertec Peripherals Group, Pertec’s peripheral activity, that mainly owned the GCR (6,250bpi) technology. This is how DDC became DDC Pertec. Just like the French subsidiary DDF became DDF Pertec.

This is when trouble started for DDC Pertec who took too much time to produce a drive in the streaming mode, a segment mostly grabbed by Cipher. DDC Pertec also tried, unsuccessfully, to manufacture 8-inch HDDs. Year after year, the worse the US head company was doing, the better the French one was working. This is why, in March 1992, DDC Pertec agreed to sell its French subsidiary, for an undisclosed amount, to a holding handled by its 2 head executives, Andre Pouget-Abadie and Alain Bouttier who had just left ATG Gigadisc.

DDF Pertec was then becoming a 100% French independent private company.

Future plans
Of course, the company’s GM knows that the reel-to-reel tape doesn’t have an ever lasting future, this doesn’t mean that magnetic reel-to-reel media have said their last word: “The future of tapes, not only half-inch, is unquestionable. We can notice, for instance, that it is favored again, Exabyte’s success proves it. In my opinion, this success will go on for three reasons: 1/ Users’ capacity needs are endless, 2/ The medium is the cheapest per megabyte, 3/ Current technological improvements on this medium suppose that we will reach recording densities close to one square micron per bit, just about the same as on optical disks. Today, we can notice that in the same 5.25-inch form factor, optical disks can store 1GB and magnetic cartridges 5GB. And the capacities of both increase at the same rate. Winchesters, optical disks and magnetic tapes will co-exist. Another evidence of the vitality of magnetic tapes is that HDD manufacturers, like Conner for instance, are now closely looking at magnetic cartridges. We have more faith in parallel longitudinal recording – not in the serpentine mode – than in helical recording because this last one doesn’t allow high enough transfer rates, and this is where Exabyte’s problems are.”

So DDF Pertec is facing its future essentially in longitudinal-recording magnetic tapes. Not having the means to mass produce, the company wishes to get ready to manufacture, in 2 to 3 years, a high end product for the computer-related market, not just for telephone exchange networks.

Pouget-Abadie is unveiling the major points: an IBM 3480 type cartridge tape, with a capacity of 40 then 200GB using longitudinal recording, a 6MB/s transfer rate, a 5.25-inch form factor, the product being developed with a unnamed partner and being partially financed by public funds. DDF Pertec is also interested in RAM disks and mainly in the ability of building a 5.25-inch model with a SCSI interface.

Manufacturers of reel-reel tape drives in the world

• Anritsu (Tokyo, Japan)
• Cipher Data Products (San Diego, CA, USA)
• DDF Pertec (Cholet, France)
• Hewlett-Packard (Greeley, CO, USA)
• IBM (San Jose, USA)
• Innovative Technology (San Diego, CA, USA)
• Kennedy Technology (Las Gatos, CA, USA)
• LMS (Colorado Springs, USA)
• M4 Data (Camberley, Surrey, UK)
• Overland Data (San Diego, CA, USA)
• Qualstar (Chatsworth, CA, USA)
• Storage Technology (Louisville, CO, USA)

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 63, published on April 1993.

Note: DDF Pertec disappears in 1997. In February 2001, Quantum DLT and storage systems unit bought M4 Data Holdings for about $56 million in cash, stock and debt.