Audio Tape Cassette Recorder Drive?

[jbiggs12]

Hey,
I was wondering if it was at all possible to hack a tape cassette recorder to use tape cassettes as tape drives... It would be really convenient, considering that we have a lot of audio cassettes sitting around the house. Is this at all possible, or would the data be fragmented/corrupted if transferred? If not, and if feasible, how many GB could be stored per tape?

 

[waw74]

i could do this in the 80's on my commodore 64.

on the C64 it was 50 Bytes a second transfer, and could store a whopping 200KB per hour of tape. so you'd need about 15 hour long tapes to store an average 3 MB mp3 and it would take 17 hours to load.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasette

although they apparently got it up to 60MB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette#Data_recording

 

[iShater]

Aaaah, the old days of data cassettes.

You can use miniDV tapes for backups fairly reliably if you got those lying around.

 

[jbiggs12]

huh...

only 60MB???
im a very cheap person, i was resistant to buying a hard drive. i guess said resistance is pointless.

 

[mobilehaathi]

i guess said resistance is pointless.

no no no, resistance is futile!

 

[iShater]

what do you plan to use this space for?

 

[jbiggs12]

i wanted to back up my computer, maybe store a few files.
i heard that DV tapes could hold a lot (~75 GB), so i assumed a data cassette could maybe hold around 20.

guess i was way off.