IBM 3480 family

Tape drives conforming with the IBM 3480 product family specification were manufactured by a variety of vendors from 1984 to 2004.

IBM designated all versions of 3480 and 3490E tape drives as members of the 3480 Product Family.

Tape drives built for the 3480 formats were initially designed for IBM System/370 computers.

The advent of the SCSI interface made it possible to connect 3480 family tape drives to personal computers, which enabled mainframe-to-PC data exchange.

During the seconds this is happening, if the host has resumed sending data, the drive stores it in the buffer.

It then accelerates the tape, reaching speed before the place where the next block needs to be written, and proceeds to write the buffered data there.

This is because it is able to read and write linear data across 18 recording tracks simultaneously, or 38,000 bytes per inch (15,000 bytes/cm) of tape.

IBM's prior technology employed 9 recording tracks with a data density of 6,250 bytes per inch (2,460 bytes/cm) of tape, so the 3480 format was greeted as a major breakthrough.

3490E tape drives were available from a variety of manufacturers with bus and tag, ESCON, or high voltage SCSI interfaces, and are capable of data transfer speeds up to 20MB per second.