cramer%clem@Sun.COM (Sam Cramer) (03/05/87)
As long as we're talking about magnetic tapes and data retention, does anyone
know if mechanical shock to a tape will cause bits to come unstuck?
Sam Cramer uucp: {cbosgd,decwrl,hplabs,seismo,ucbvax}!sun!cramer
arpanet: cramer@sun.combrunner@sri-spam.istc.sri.com (Thomas Eric Brunner) (03/06/87)
In article <14551@sun.uucp> cramer@sun.UUCP (Sam Cramer) writes: >As long as we're talking about magnetic tapes and data retention, does anyone >know if mechanical shock to a tape will cause bits to come unstuck? No, but I'm willing to design an empirical test using your tapes :-) -- how about a great big spidery "X"?
rupp@cod.UUCP (William L. Rupp) (03/06/87)
I am no expert on the issue of reuse of magtapes, but it seems to me that a great amount of use would cause such tapes to be stretched. This would probably be a more likely effect with computer tapes than with audio because of the more frequent starts and stops. I have also been lead to believe that old tapes which have not been used in a long time loose their elasticity. I was afraid some reel-reel audio tapes recorded by me in the early 1970s might have suffered that fate, but I recently played some of them and they seem okay. Of course, those were audio and not computer tapes.