History (1995): Twin Peaks From M4 Data

Reel-to-reel tape drive manufacturer M4 Data Ltd. (Camberley, Surrey, UK), a €10 million ($16 million) company, has revealed its first cartridge drive, the Twin Peaks M490E, a desktop or rack-mount unit for 36-track 3490E media.

“It’s a mainframe class tape in a shoe box,” said Charles Donkin, senior staff engineer, M4.

Two units can be mounted one next to the other in a single 19-inch rack. This device was designed by M4, except for the heads and LSI that come from Storage Technology, M4’s partner that participated in the operation financially and most likely will list the unit in its catalog.

The M490E is also able to read – but unable to write – 3480 cartridges with 18 tracks. It supports data compression (IDRC) and data compaction. Its sustained throughput rate is 3MB/s in native mode via an SCSl-2 or FIPS interface for large computers using a 4MB buffer.

The tape moves at 2ms in R/W mode and 4ms in rewind or cartridge magazines with one extra slot for priority access or cleaning media. Tape loading lasts 7s. Each magazine can be removed while the others remain in operation.

The M490E will be in production next July and will be available to VAR and OEM at FF63,000 ($12,600) for the drive and FF75,000 ($15,000) with the autoloader, according to sales manager Peter Baxter.

M4 continues to manufacture its reel-to-reel tape drives at a rate of 500 per month and envisions moving the assembly to China in the near future.

With Twin Peaks, the UK firm will enter into the 36-track desktop cartridge compatible drives currently dominated primarily by Fujitsu, the first to launch into this market, followed by Philips LMS and IBM, whose common units have been less successful.

Last November, Hitachi introduced its MT550, a 36-track drive, read compatible with 18-track cartridge. OEM evaluation price is $15,500 for the drive and $1,500 for an 8-cartridge autoloader. Production is scheduled for 1995.

The most recent competitor, Overland Data, offers a drive available exclusively with its autoloader. It is the only one that can read and write 18-track cartridges.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 87, published on April 1995.