The H-6488-1 was designed to address growing security needs for magnetic tape cartridges that were not only increasing in capacity and performance but also increasingly portable as backups of magnetic disk volumes. Hitachi began shipping the H-6488-1 in January 1993.
- The H-6488-1 had the following features:
- （1）Large storage capacity
- The unit could write between 2.4 and 4 GB of data per cartridge by realizing bidirectional recording with a 36-track head, adding two data compression functions standard, and supporting extended tape cartridges that were twice the length of normal cartridges
- （2）High performance
- Data transfer performance was raised significantly by eliminating channel bottlenecks with an 8 MB data buffer in the controller and two data compression functions
- （3）More robust security
- Hitachi realized data encryption without sacrificing data compression benefits by furnishing the magnetic tape controller with an encryption function based on a proprietary encoding scheme
- （4）Support for ACONARC (advanced connection architecture)
- The H-6488-1 supported ACONARC, an architecture for serial data transmission over optical fiber, which allowed the unit to be as far as 9 kilometers away from the host CPU and permitted up to 128 logical bus connections
The existing H-6486-1 also supported these functions through a field upgrade kit.
| Model name | H-6488-1 | H-6485-1(for reference) |
|---|---|---|
| Magnetic tape specifications | width:1/2inch, length: 165 m width:1/2inch, length: 330 m |
|
| Number of tracks | 36 | 18 |
| Recording density [bytes/inch] | 76,000 | 38,000 |
| IBG（ｍｍ） | 2 | |
| Tape speed [m/s] | 2 | |
| Tape speed [m/s] | 3.0/6.0 /9.0 | 3.0/6.0 |
| Number of drives | 4 | 2 |
