High speed tape drive

[doug_in_nc]

Has anyone seen one of these “data drives” before? Is it actually faster, or is it just a 1530-compatible that looks really slick?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334235221502?h ... SwAaNho4S8

[Mike]

These don't take ordinary cassette tapes but so-called 'wafer' cartridges with a continuous tape.

From a master wafer one loaded a small utility program with the standard KERNAL tape routines which then was used to format user wafers. The utility could also produce a directory and provided quick fast forward to seek the data to be accessed, then also at higher speed than normal KERNAL tape load and save.

Unfortunately, the loops tend to break at the place they're glued together, resulting in tangled-up tape.

For further info, see here: Entrepo Quick Data Drive Master QOS Wafer

[doug_in_nc]

Thanks! They really don’t seem to be reliable, or at least not when they are 40 years old.