So I came across a box of these small casette style tapes cleaning out a store room, some TDK and some IBM that are labeled as “DDS-4” 20/40gb. What the heck are these things? They’re all sealed and new, never used before. What do these go with? Are these some type of old fashioned data holding system? The packaging and design don’t look very old at all.
Tape backup carts. For sheer data volume, you can’t beat tape, although it’s slow as all getout. They’re still used for automated backups whenever you need high data capacity and the ability to rewrite over and over. Webserver backups, for example.
Somewhere in the office there’s a server that uses those. 20G isn’t a super huge amount, but it’s plenty to store an OS and the essentials of most software installations.
It also can’t be beat for cheap off-site backups, though with hard disks becoming cheaper, there’s a system our IT guy has been looking at that is basically laptop HDs in a caddy that plug in and out like tape.
Still quite in use though.
They look like they can be bought in packs of ten for $94. That is 400 gig. 320 gig hard drives can be had for $99. I am not sure tape is much cheaper any more.
I did of course attempt a quick Googling before posting. We’re tossing out all sorts of stuff from a closed office, and in the haste that starts to come along with doing such a boring and dirty job I wanted to make sure we didn’t chuck anything essential or expensive. All Google got me was that same $94 figure, which while not the most mind boggling thing I’ve ever seen, it was quite higher than I would have guessed. I know they’re not compatible with any of our offices equiptment, but hey, worth a look. I don’t suppose they have any additional uses, say in an audio capacity, because the first thing I thought of was “These here things look a lot like the old DAT tapes I used to use”.
My recollection is fuzzy, but we used to use these for server backups on a software team I was on in about 1996. If my understanding is correct, they are basically identical technology to DAT, but the quality grade of the tapes may be higher to allow more data to be packed on (in other words, I’m pretty sure the tapes you have could be used as DATs, although I’m not sure that holds if they’ve been formatted as backup tapes). They were even colloquially referred to as “DAT backups” by some of the people I worked with, even though that’s obviously a misnomer as we weren’t backing up digital audio, but rather source code.
If you’re sure nobody in your office uses them anymore, I’d say it’s worth eBaying them (assuming they’re wrapped and unused - not that the buyer would mind much, but it’s always fun to see what kind of confidential info gets distributed when selling old HDs, tape, etc. etc.).
Slow to access data on a tape, perhaps, but the bandwith can be amazing…
A while back, we needed to move some significant portion of an exabyte (a million terabytes) of warehoused data from one data center to another. Some wit paraphrased Andrew Tanenbaum and said “You just can’t beat the bandwith of a van full of tapes going up [interstate highway] 80” as a reference to how it would be faster to physically load a few thousand tapes into a vehicle and drive it somewhere than it would be to push the data down the OC-192 fiber link between the data centers.