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Backing up data on the world's smallest cassette tape? Yes please.

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LGR Oddware - Datasonix Pereos

smallest cassette tape storage

Comments

Anonymous

cool use Sony NT nano cassete !!

Anonymous

4:12 OH HI TECHMOAN.

Anonymous

It's so tiny! This amuses me. Interesting video as always LGR

Nicholas Wilson

Awesome! I want one but like you said, there just aren’t any arround! 😔 There’s a cleaning cassette available on eBay. <a href="https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F282839562437" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F282839562437</a>

Anonymous

Awesome bit of kit! and an awesome LGR Oddware! Thanks Clint!

Mukul Kewalramani

Have you done an Iomega Jaz Drive review?!

Anonymous

I have 80kbps DL speed at the moment. I'm loading the video in 360p. I simply cannot wait. This is SO up my alley, it might as well be my driveway.

Techmoan

Only too happy to help. Since I did that NT video I've always wanted to see one of these in action.

avfusion

Think of how cool you would be to get to school with this tiny tape

Anonymous

The packaging and advertisements remind me of mid-1990s Apple, with white backgrounds and liberal use of Garamond Narrow. If it were a few years later, they probably would have called it something like "iCassette."

LazyGameReviews

Thank you once again! The tape immediately looked familiar when I first found out about the device and then that lightbulb moment of "heyyyy Techmoan" put two and two together.

LazyGameReviews

It does have a similar look indeed! Although I imagine Apple would never have put MOSTLY text on the front of their box, heh.

LazyGameReviews

Yep, that's been about the only Datasonix thing that's been up for years until this unit came along.

Anonymous

Nice video. The moment I started watching I remembered the Techmoan episode on the audio version of this and wondered if you'd mention it... and you did! I never saw this tape backup medium during the 90s. However, if I had seen it, I am not sure I would have wanted it either. I mean, small is good for portable devices and whatnot. But I think for home backup I would have probably been more comfortable with a larger tape like the iOmega Ditto drive.

Peter Metzger

"I chose pod" jealousy++;

Alyxx the Rat

My brain was so confused when you shoved the box into the picture and I saw 3 hands...

LazyGameReviews

Thank you! Absolutely agreed. And combined with the high price and slow access times, it just doesn't make much sense if you want to backup this amount of data.

Anonymous

Wow, every time I think I know about all the kinds of crazy hardware out there you prove me wrong yet again. There's a gigantic world of unknown old stuff out there.

Anonymous

Those tiny tapes are super cute. I wonder if they could've got away with charging more for them? $34.95 would've been really cheap for 1gb back then, right? Also, nice era-appropriate mouse on your Vectra there. ;)

Anonymous

I'm sure there's a Tefifon backup device somewhere out there. When are you going to do that love letter to POD video ? ;)

Anonymous

I love your Oddware videos and this was was truly awesome. I can imagine though that usb would have played it's part in killing off a device like this though.

Jason McMillon

At 12:58, when you exclaim "Nice!" after restoring Pod, I envisioned you were channeling Steve1989.

Kris Asick

Storing that much data in that little flexible magnetic space can't possibly be that resilient to data corruption. It'd be interesting to know more about the reliability of these tiny little tapes. :B

LazyGameReviews

Every single file I backed up restored 100% in my testing, so there's that! More than I can say for the VHS backup system I covered a while back, although I expected as much.

LazyGameReviews

USB wasn't even fully released until January 1996. Seeing as the Pereos was killed off in early 1996 and USB didn't become popular til 1997, I doubt it had much influence in this case :)

Anonymous

1.5 GB on tape that 300 more MB then a GD ROM 750 more then a CD ROM thanks for the cool info

Anonymous

In the HDD sizes grew so quickly in the 90s that what once seemed like more space than you could ever use ended up being a fraction of what you needed and eventually could buy. I'm glad I didn't invest in anything like that. It would have quickly lost its usefulness.

Tktagmedia

Fun fact: the digital audio version of these tapes that Sony was pushing utilized the XA audio codec, which was later reused in the original Sony PlayStation as a means to stream low-bandwidth high-quality pre-recorded music. It was a less system-intensive alternative to Redbook Audio. titles that used this include Dance Dance Revolution, Silent Hill, Parasite Eve, Metal Gear Solid, Spyro the Dragon, the Resident Evil series and countless others.

Anonymous

For something that would be completely boring you made this very interesting to watch. Keep up the great work!

Anonymous

Yay, two of the Youtubers i support on Patreon working together, awesome. :) I always chuckle when i see parallel data interfaces. I know USB came a little bit later, but there had to be a better (faster) way than LPT.

Joon Choi

I have to imagine long term data integrity was not a strong suit of these micro tapes. Great video Clint!

LazyGameReviews

I mean, completely digital storage with layers of error correction, similar to the DAT technology used in recording studios. So I imagine it's better than certain other tapes :)

LazyGameReviews

Serial was the other common interface, but it only sent data one way instead of two (hence the naming of each.) But there were situations where serial could be faster, with some caveats :) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_communication" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_communication</a>#Serial_versus_parallel