Overview
Peripheral Vision Tech LTD (PV) (Reading UK), have developed a Solid state Tape drive with emulation capability aimed at Legacy systems. This is a QIC 02 tape drive with no moving parts in a 3.5” form factor. Data is stored on an industry standard industrial strength Compact Flash (CF) card, which can be easily removed, and treated as a replacement for the tape cartridge. The CF card can then be plugged into a Windows PC and the data archived. It has a standard QIC 02 interface and can be configured to replace those hard-to-find QIC 02 XXX tape drives used in legacy systems.
This will replace the following drives:
- WANGTEK QT 250e, WANGTEK 5150EQ, 5099
- TANDBERG TDC 3309, TDC3630, TDC 3650,
- Archive 5945L-3, 5945 (with SAC)
- Cipher 540, Tecmar and Travan
When connected to a Host, the Host sees the PCB as a regular QIC 02 Tape dive. It is a single printed circuit board (PCB) controller, that bridges the CF card to a QIC 02 interface bus. When attached to a host, the FLASHTAPE device appears as a QIC 02 XXX tape drive. The card accepts 5 volt power, and QIC-02 signals via the standard edge connector.
Features
- QIC 02 solid state Tape drive that uses an industry strength standard Compact Flash (CF) Card as its storage.
- Typically 3.5” form factor. However various form factors are available so that the product is a mechanical match for the original drive.
- No Host software or hardware modifications are necessary. Plug & Play operation.
- The original drive can simply be removed and replaced by the FlashTape. Cable connectivity is the same.
- It requires 5V only which is supplied via the same standard molex style disk power connector.
- Tape capacities only limited by current CF cards (currently 256 GB).
- No moving parts. Rugged. Overcomes the reliability problems of ageing tape drives.
- Vastly improved reliability and MTBF over the original drive.
- Low Power, 5V only-- less than 400Ma.
- Allows backup data to be stored on small and rugged media.
- Eliminates problems of slow backups shoe-shining the tape drive, which eventually leads to traditional tape failures.
- Removable low-cost Flash card can be treated as a single tape media, and then copied to a Windows PC.
- Write Protect available either via a front panel switch or via the CF cards that come with integral Write-protect switches.
- Existing tapes can be copied to CF cards allowing future-proofing of existing backup data.
- PV aim the product as a low-cost way to give extra life for Legacy Hosts which would otherwise need to use unreliable second-hand drives.
