Comment by jandrese
3 years ago
At the very least the drive needs to be able to lock onto the signal. It's probably encoded in a helix on the drive and if the head isn't synchronized properly you won't get anything useful, even with a high sampling rate.
I would be surprised if it used helical recording. Data tape recorders rarely do because it's much more complex, increases tape wear, and the use cases don't usually demand that kind of linear bandwidth.
Wasn't the whole selling point of these drives that they were able to encode more on the tape than their competitors? I figure that must include some clever tricks.
The data format is documented at a high level here:
https://github.com/Kneesnap/onstream-data-recovery/blob/main...
It's a linear, 192-track format that's read 8 tracks at a time. The other files in that repo are also worth reading.