Listing of July 1996 Reviews
By David W. Methvin
As disk drives have grown, personal tape backup drives have scrambled
to keep up. With an 800MB capacity using uncompressed data, and
up to 1.6GB when compressed, the TEAC Tape1600 offers enough capa-city
to back up a typical hard disk on a single tape cartridge.
Installing the Tape1600 is about as easy as it could be for an
internally mounted device. It can fit into a 3.5-inch bay, but
I used the adapter hardware provided in the kit to mount the drive
in a 5.25-inch bay. A provided cable plugs directly into the floppy
controller, and the existing floppy cable plugs into a connector
on the new cable. This is much more flexible than some other tape
drives I've seen that require you to contort your existing floppy
disk drive cable to put their connectors into service.
Both DOS and Windows versions of Arcada Backup are provided, and
the Windows version recognizes Windows 95. Under Windows 95, the
program can save and restore your Registry if you want. In my
tests using default settings, a full backup of a 1GB drive that
had 11,099 files and 681MB of data in files took 1 hour and 33
minutes. A selective restore of 529 files totaling 79MB took 16
minutes. The backup program reported that the tape was 51 percent
full at the end of the backup, so the total capacity of the tape
in this case would have been more like 1.3GB, not 1.6GB. With
compression enabled, the maximum capa-city will vary depending
on the compressibility of your disk's data and the options you
select during backup.
--Info File--
TEAC Tape1600
Price: $179 (street)
Pros: Installation; operation
Cons: Speed
Platforms: Windows 95, 3.1x
TEAC America
213-726-0303, fax 213-727-7652
WinMag Box Score: 3.0