IBM and HP 9-track tape drives in operation

This video is showing two old 9-track tape SCSI drives in classic operation. Such tape reels and drives were ordinary used in mainframe era back in 1970's and 1980's.
...and I am very proud of having these two vintage and working ones. :-)

Tape drive on the right side was manufactured by Hewlett-Packard in 1995 and has manual tape loading. It also requires special power transformer, because it's voltage is around 60 volts DC.
Second tape drive (left side) was manufactured by IBM in 1991. It has very nice automatic tape loading by air stream. Presence of tape is detected by optical sensors.

Both drives are connected to a standard PC with two SCSI host adapters, because "IBM" is High Voltage differential (HVD) and "HP" is standard low voltage differential, single ended (LVD SE). Those devices cannot be on same bus - damaged could occur!!! This PC is running Linux, because it has native support for SCSI tape drives.

First you can see loading tape media, than writing some files by TAR. After automatic rewind back to beginning of tape are listed stored files. And finally comes soft unload by MT command.

Overall size of backed-up files was up to 30MB. Total capacity of such tape is 170MB (10,5" tape reel in IBM drive).