100% Restore from tapes boiled in water

Boiling Test
Few things are as damaging to the dimensional integrity of data storage tape as elevated temperature. The media plastic film is extremely thin - just a few microns, or about a tenth of the diameter of a human hair. The slightest overheating makes it warp, curl, and lose its original shape. Every conventional tape technology relies on micron-precision alignment between data tracks and magnetic heads - but not VXA.

Disaster Tested
Unlike conventional tape drives, which write data in continuous tracks thousands of bytes long, a VXA tape drive writes the data in flexible, efficient packets. VXA Packet Drives can read them one at a time, in any order, even if the tape is deformed, and then put them back together in its data buffer to rebuild the original data. Coupled with VXA's sophisticated 4-level Reed Solomon hardware error correction, the most advanced in the industry, rest assured that VXA Packet Drives can restore data that would be lost with other tape drives.

How We Ran the Test¹
First, we wrote a VXA X-Tape Packet Tape Cartridge with 1 Gigabyte of data. For this test, we used filtered tap water, which we poured into a beaker and brought to a rapid boil. At our altitude, in Boulder, Colorado, this is a temperature of about 96 C. We submerged the tape in the boiling water for one full minute. The tape was then shaken to remove excess moisture, and padded dry with paper towels. We let the tapes dry for 48 hours in a standard office environment. The relative humidity was 15%-20% during the drying process (tested at our facility in Boulder, Colorado).

The Result: 100% Restore
After drying, the tape was loaded into a VXA-2 tape drive, and the original data was restored without error. Proof positive that it's not just a slogan, VXA Packet Tape Technology truly is "Disaster Tested!"

¹ All tests documented with signed affidavits. Copies available on request.