In the fallout of the dot-com bust, I had various friends at businesses which were downsizing and getting rid of surplus equipment. It was typically being liquidated or sometimes simply junked, and as the business no longer cared, some of the equipment followed me home to enjoy a retirement period. This is how a large ADIC tape library made it into my basement datacentre. [I know I have some photos and videos of this thing around somewhere; I’ll include them here if I ever find them.]
Some of you may be familiar with DLT tape, or its successor sDLT, or possibly LTO, which shares a similar form factor and continues to be in production.
My tape library had two DLT7000 drives, and a capacity of roughly two dozen tapes. I recall that one of the drives was a bit unreliable, and I never had need of simultaneous use of both drives, so I made do with a single drive. It was enough.
The tape library used High Voltage Differential SCSI, and included an Adaptec 2944UW Ultrawide controller, which supports devices 25m (82ft) away from the controller. That sounds like a lot, but I suspect the actual use cases were for large racked systems in a machine room (what we now call a small or enterprise datacenter), and being able to put a tape library at the end of an aisle for easy access by the operator(s) makes sense.
I still have the controller and a very long cable (although not 25m) saved for a rainy day, to drive either a remote tape library, SCSI tray, or both. I know there’s some rackmount and standalone converters that can plug in HVD on one side and LVD on the other. Paralan MH16 seems to be the magic box.
It’s all contributing to the heat death of the planet, but getting big trays of disks tuned is strangely satisfying. grind them into the dust and use them until they fail, maybe? I packed up my HVD SCSI since I’m almost certain it will completely disappear if sent to the recyclers.
As I finish up this orphaned post in 2026, it seems even more relevant, as I am now holding on to spinning rust much longer than I used to due to the stupidly high prices of storage. I still have some TB drives in my retired FreeBSD server; maybe I should get these online, even if they are behind a very low-end controller…