Tape Readers: 7-track and 9-track

CISL maintains three magnetic tape drives for reading data stored on half-inch tapes. The 7-track drive (upper photo) is connected to the dedicated server "seventrack" and is capable of reading tapes with 556 and 800-bpi data densities. The two 9-track drives (lower photo) are connected to "bison" and can read tapes with data densities from 800 bpi to 6,250 bpi. Software that is accessible from both servers allows data to be read from the tapes in native form and with BCD-to-ASCII and DPC-to-ASCII conversions.

Researchers and data managers who have magnetic tapes containing atmospheric and related sciences data but no means for reading them can request that CISL read their tapes and make the data available for retrieval on an FTP server. For more information on data rescue from magnetic tapes and associated fees, please submit a work request. If you don't have a UCAR computing account, you can contact datahelp@ucar.edu.

In 2003, the CISL Data Support Section read more than 2,500 half-inch tapes on the 7-track and 9-track tape drives and created files on the NCAR MSS from those data. This effort rescued many old source data collections and removed the remaining magnetic tapes from the Research Data Archive, many of which had hung in a storeroom for more than 20 years.