Hacker News Reader

How long did it take? Seek times for tapes can be minutes, so fragmentation matters a great deal here.

installation was more than overnight. once it was up and running, it was remarkably responsive, in the short run, but would invariably need to do a lot of seeking to launch any app. The sort of thing if you are sitting nearby you could give it some input every couple minutes.

For some fringe use cases one could drop a readily installed (and defragmented!) OS image to the tape and boot it up. I've only had some floppy tape drives and parallel-port attached Ditto. They didn't support random access, or at least I never had a driver that could do that.

I seem to recall some vendor (HP?) selling external tape drives at some point that supported bootable, bare metal Windows restore from tape.

I believe it worked by supplying the recovery software as a bootable ISO image in ROM on the drive and emulating a bootable (USB? SCSI?) CD-ROM drive at boot.

DAT tapes presented as disk drivers, sector addressable. and you can dump a .iso to a disk to make it bootable, so sounds right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com