University of Georgia: Office of the Chief Information Officer

Reel-to-Reel magnetic tape service to be discontinued on December 15, 2009

ATHENS, Ga.— EITS will be discontinuing reel-to-reel magnetic tape service, which has been provided in the Boyd Data Center since the early 1970's.

The IBM 3420 Model 6 has been used since the early 70's for read/write operations for reel-to-reel magnetic tapes.

The device which reads data stored on these tapes (see photo) will be removed from the Boyd Data Center on December 15, 2009.

For several years, physical reel-to-reel tapes have been replaced by a virtual tape system from IBM. The virtual tape system stores the data on a