IBM 3850
The IBM 3850 Mass Storage System was designed as an online tape library to hold infrequently accessed data.
The MSS (as it was known) consisted of a library of cylindrical plastic cartridges, two inches wide and four inches long, each holding a spool of tape 770 inches long. These cartridges were held in a hexagonal array of bins in the 3851 Mass Storage Facility (about 20 feet long). New cartridges were rolled into the facility and were automatically stored in a vacant bin. The data was accessed via one or two IBM 3330 disk drives, the data being transferred automatically between cartridge and disk drive in processes called staging and destaging.
The largest model could hold 4,720 cartridges – the equivalent of 2,360 IBM 3330 disk drives (about 236 billion bytes of data).
External links
Categories: IBM hardware | IBM storage devices