History 2000: IBM 3590 Tape Cartridges

IBM’s old 3480 cartridge has not given up the ghost yet. In fact, it’s taken something of a youth potion. What was once only 200MB in capacity, in 1994, became through several stages, first the 3590 with 10GB and 7MB/s in 1995, 3590E with 20/14 in May 1999 and a jump from 128 to 256 tracks.

Now it’s hit 40/14 (or up to 120/42 with 3:1 compression), by doubling the tape length to 634 meters in a cartridge manufactured by Imation, Big Blue’s partner in this venture.

It is based on a substrate in polyethylene naphtalate, with a thickness down from 14.2p to 6.3p. The Magstar 3590 Extended High Performance Cartridge can be used with IBM’s 3590E drives, but also with the 3590B models, although in that case, only attains 20GB capacity and 9MB/s transfer rate. In both cases, however, the current models require a hardware upgrade and a microcode change. All drives shipped by IBM since March 3 already incorporate these features.

To date, Big Blue has sold 58,000 Magstar 3590 units, for its own clients or OEMs such as StorageTek.

Fujitsu is the only manufacturer of 3590-compatible drives, with its M8100 (10/13.5) devices that Adic has just integrated in its high-end Automated Mixed-Media Libraries (AMLs), which boast from 320 to 50,000 slots

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 146 on March 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: IBM 3590 were later replaced by IBM 3592.