It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/LaundryMan2008 on 2025-01-17 20:10:15.

I haven’t been posting many high quality posts lately on Reddit on any subreddits due to college exams (Unit 1 networking and Unit 2 Access Databases) and other stuff in life happening but I have built up quite a few data storage media in the meantime to post in the upcoming weeks in the month that I was away which I’ll be posting about, also managed to get a job which pays me consistent money which means I’ll be able to buy some more media to hang up on my wall more frequently.

Today I got a LTO cleaning cartridge and a damaged LTO-4 cartridge to hang up (also have a LTO-5 cartridge but I haven‘t opened it yet (sealed) because I haven’t reprogrammed my LTO-5 tape drives yet so it’s not ready for my wall until I have the tape drives reprogrammed and ready to test) on my wall, the cleaning tape I bought to see if it did anything to fix the tape drive from work experience but it was unsuccessful (prior to that, I did a manual clean and after the cleaning tape, I took out the heads and gave them a very good clean with a Q-Tip which was also unsuccessful), the damaged LTO-4 cartridge came from a broken HP LTO-4 tape drive which I managed to fix, the tape had ripped off and the leader came with it so I took the tape out manually and rethreaded the leader into the mechanism which fixed it.

About the 3D printed bezels, the same reason as with the data storage mediums posts, I had to take a pause on that to focus on my exams but since they are done I’ll be getting back to prototyping which is almost done, just move the button down a little and it should be ready to put up on eBay and on a .STL site for 50p.

As for the 4 tape drives that I bought off eBay, I still had some trouble figuring out the pinout of the library edge connector on the sled to give it some UART signals and my USB to UART adapter had gotten lost in shipping so I couldn’t actually try reprogramming it, I know where the power lines are but not the data ones, I do know what pins they are on but since I don’t have the USB to UART converter handy, I can’t actually check which pins are Rx and Tx until I get my adapter, I can give you a small spoiler, I did a head swap between a library drive and the work experience one but I won’t reveal the result until I get all 4 (plus the one from work experience) fully tested and reprogrammed.

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 11 (25th week): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1h8dk0b/my_data_storage_mediums_post_11_25th_week/

All of my tapes so far, I also have a LTO-5 cartridge but I’m not opening it (sealed) until I have my tape drives reprogrammed so it’s not present there

IBM LTO Universal Cleaning Cartridge, ideally I would have wanted an HP one as LTO-6 will be black in my order of all generations and no color duplicates but I’ll probably collect HP and other brand color tapes (including WORM making it nearly double the amount of tapes) anyways just because I can and because LTO is a cool data storage medium format, I’ll then proceed to show off my tape collection like the person with the Windows OS collection when I do

LTO-4 cartridge (holds 800GB uncompressed and 1.6TB compressed, also is the last generation before LTFS is introduced for LTO-5)

Sneak peek at one of the 4 tape drives that I fixed successfully

The reason it was damaged was because the tape drive somehow ripped through the tape and made it get stuck in the tape drive, I extracted the tape manually and pulled out all of the remaining tape in the drive and rethreaded the leader hook back through the mechanism