The best data storage solutions always come from people who realise just how critical your data is. At Castle we know how important keeping your data is and fully test all of out backup products prior to dispatch. Tape drives from major manufacturers such as Quantum and Hp are of course of the highest quality and ideal for most backup solutions.

Established since 1995 Castle Computers supply new and refurbished tape drives and are market leaders in their field. Tape drive devices are often discontinued, so finding that replacement is not always easy. At Castle we supply a whole range of discontinued products to keep up with the needs of our customer’s .

With an in-house repair facility for tape drives and other backup products we will help you every step of the way. A comprehensive range of installation services is also available if required as is on-site repair of tape drives.

Castle Computers have been selling HP Autoloaders for a number of years now. One of the most popular ranges are the 1/8 value loaders.

 Holding a total of 8 tapes (or 7 tapes and 1 cleaning tape) these compact autoloaders can use ether LTO1 (C9572CB), LTO2 (AA927A), LTO3 (AF204A) or LTO448 (AF203A) drives. They can be mounted in a rack or used and a desktop device. All of them have an LVD Ultrawide 68pin interface and they are also available with an optional barcode reader.

Being 2U in height means that they are an excellent backup solution for small to medium sized offices and offer a fast and reliable transfer of data. Please call our sales department for further information

What is a tape drive?  We often get asked that question. Very simply put a tape drive is a storage device for data and is sometimes called a streamer. The data itself is stored on magnetic tape which the device can write and read to.

Tape drives are different from random-access data devices as access is only sequential.  There are many ways in which tape drive backup devices can be attached to a computer  the most common of which is SCSI. Nowadays people also use USB or fibre channel. The reason tape drives are so popular is the amount of data storage they can handle which ranges from just a few megabytes to in excess of 900 GB.

The other great feature of tape drives is the level of security they offer and the fact the media is portable and can easily be stored in a secure backup location. Compression ratios achievable on drives today also means that the data can be stored more efficiently.  Raw storage capacity of tape drives is called native capacity.

For fully automated backup solutions tape libraries and autoloaders are used with the tape drives inside them which means that multiple tapes can be accessed through archived solutions and capacity can be increased. Most tape drives now have variable speed levels with implemented algorithms which can match the computer data rate dynamically when backing up data.

Here at Tape Drives we aim to make the process of finding a backup solution or replacement tape drive simplicity itself. All of our backup pages make use of the “get a quote” system so that you can rest assured we will provide you with backup tape information as quickly as is possible.

You may have a fairly old Quantum setup or IBM tape drive we can help with the simple “get a quote” system where our customer service staff will get in touch with you. The reason we have implemented this system is to make the backup tape drive selection process much easier and for you to make certain you get the right backup product.

Our database is literally packed full of stock, so whatever the tape drive requirement is we are here to help.