Today I was given an IBM 3590 tape cartridge by someone completely else to the person that gave me the 3592 tape cartridge but it still came from the same PGS geographical company as the 3592 cartridge which now I am very curious to see what the data is on there assuming I can decode the .TAR format into files, the person also had a few 3590 tape drives at their job which were unfortunately signed off for recycling and they are to be sent off to another country to be scrapped out which means I can’t have a single one of them :( or go to the recycling company’s place and buy one from them which is a shame as I have a video of one operating that I took before they loaded them up onto a lorry (truck for the UK people) and took them, I cried a little knowing these pieces of history are wasted, I did try to offer £40 for one but they didn’t budge on it citing the contract has been signed and not being able to go back on it.
The IBM 3590 was a format that replaced the IBM 3490 tape series and was eclipsed by the IBM 3592 which had much higher storage capacities up to 50TB, speeds and drive density as these IBM 3590 drives took up a lot more space while the IBM 3592 was a full height 5.25” drive which means it could fit inside of a PC bay provided you bend the tabs out inside (these tabs are there to help guide half height 5.25” drives into the bay as most common consumer drives and accessories are half height) to allow the full height drive to fit in the 2 5.25” bays, these types of drive were intended to be used in a mainframe application with rows upon rows of tapes that are picked and chosen by robots to be placed into the tape drives for data backup, humans aren’t meant to touch or see any of these tapes with the exception of expired cleaning cartridges which are deposited into a box to be collected and replaced with new ones, there are also calibration cartridges which are only used for when a new tape drive is put into service or in the event of a read/write error to be able to recalibrate the heads and tape mechanism.
The IBM 3590 tape cartridges came in 3 different generations which is further split into 2 lengths where one is a standard length “High Speed” data cartridge and an extended length “High Speed” data cartridge, the types are as follows:
3590-B
10GB standard length “High Speed” data cartridge (this is what I have)
20GB extended length “High Speed” data cartridge
3590-E
20GB standard length “High Speed” data cartridge
40GB extended length “High Speed” data cartridge
3590-H
30GB standard length “High Speed” data cartridge
60GB extended length “High Speed” data cartridge
Here is a video of it operating which shows the marvel of engineering that was unfortunately scrapped (16 of them D: ), it had pneumatic tubes feeding to many parts of the tape drive to keep the tape stuck to the walls as the tape needed to be tight on the heads to ensure good reads and writes moving back and forth at high speeds and to operate the arm that pulls the tape media around the mechanism and to the drive spool (you can even hear a slight hiss as the arm makes its way around the drive), the design stuck around on the 3592 and IBM LTO tape drives but was motorized instead of being pneumatic which is why it was very loud.
The inner workings of an IBM 3590 tape drive complete with sound - GIF - Imgur
Thank you for reading this Friday‘s post and I hope you have a great day, if you have any queries, thoughts about the format, additional information or to point out a mistake, please put them in the comments :)
Link to previous post, post 17 (36th week): My data storage mediums, post 17 (36th week) : r/DataHoarder
Link to future post, (To be posted)
The cartridge on my wall
The cartridge up close, not shown is the very cool font used on the barcodes which I wish I could have taken a photo of before this post
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