System having tape drive emulator and data tape cartridge housing carrying multiple disk drives

摘要

A system is described including a disk-based data cartridge that contains a plurality of disk drives, and that physically conforms to industry standard dimensions for magnetic data tape cartridges. A tape drive emulator receives the disk-based data cartridge and stores data within the plurality of disk drives in accordance with a format that emulates a tape storage format. A controller within the tape drive emulator utilizes RAID techniques to store data on the plurality of disk drives, thereby achieving increased performance, fault tolerance, or combinations thereof. A host computing device communicates the data to the tape drive emulator via a tape drive communication protocol. An automation unit selectively retrieves the disk-based data cartridge from a data tape cartridge library and engages the disk-based data cartridge with the tape drive emulator.