Dave Andrews
A new family of
entry-level QIC tape products
will be released this year that can store up to 1.6 GB of uncompressed data on a single cartridge. The proposed Travan standard is an effort by QIC vendors to keep pace with the ever-increasing capacity of today's hard drives. However, even with a 400-foot QIC-3010 tape, which can hold up to 340 MB of uncompressed data, you can't back up all the data stored on a 990-MB hard drive without swapping tapes in and out of the tape drive.
More expensive QIC systems with larger capacities are still available. For example, Conner Peripherals' TSM4000R drive complies wit
h the QIC-3080 standard and can hold 1.6 GB of uncompressed data. But it lists for $659, and many users like the low price tags of QIC-80, QIC-3010, and QIC-3020 drives. Colorado Memory Systems' Jumbo 350 and Conner Peripherals' TSM420R QIC-80 drives hold only 170 MB (native mode) and both list for just $199.
Before Travan, QIC vendors had increased the capacity of the original QIC-80 standard (see the chart) by increasing the tape's length. Also, the QIC-3010 and QIC-3020 drives, which have thin-film magnetoresistive heads, can handle higher bit densities than the older metal heads that were used in QIC-80 drives. And the QIC-Wide format, which specifies a 0.315-inch-width and 400-foot-length tape, was recently folded into existing QIC standards. Tape drives like Conner's Tape*Stor 420 can read older QIC-80 and QIC-40 tape cartridges in addition to writing to the QIC-Wide tape.
Travan, which industry experts expect will be up for approval this month at a QIC standards meeting, specifies tape th
at's 0.315 inch wide (compared to the previous 0.25-inch width) and 750 feet long. New Travan drives should be able to accept and read tape cartridges that comply to older standards.
The next move to make QIC more palatable to end users is to increase the backup speed. Backup rates of low-end systems with either floppy disk or parallel-port interfaces range from 2 to 10 MB per minute. Some tape drives with ATAPI (ATA Packet Interface) connections offer claimed data rates of up to 54 MB per minute.
ENTRY-LEVEL QIC STANDARDS
TAPE LENGTH, CAPACITY, MB
IN FEET* COERCIVITY NATIVE QIC-WIDE** TRAVAN***
QIC-80 307.5/425 550 125/170 210 400
QIC-3010 400 900 340 425 800
QIC-3020 400 900 680 850 1600
* Older QIC tapes are 0.25 inch wide.
** QIC-Wide specifies a tape minicartridge format of 0.315 inch
wide and 400 feet long.
*** Travan, which is slated to be voted on this month, proposes a
0.315-inch-wide, 750-foot-long tape.
photo_link (7 Kbytes)
Low-End QIC Gets a Capacity Boost
