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CERN LHC tapes

The preamble

I recently went to CERN and bought a LGH data tape souvenir. This is a 8.5 Terabyte magnetic tape that is retired but has not been wiped. What makes it valuable is not the plastic, but the data contained within said plastic.

Project description

Target: Develop a method to read and analyze data on CERN's LHC tapes.

Why: CERN claims some tapes can contain a Higgs boson event. The target is to find if my tape has any of said events.

The storage media

Looking at the tape cartridge and it's capacity tells it's a member of the StorageTek T10000 family made by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle)

To be exact, this is a T10000D (from now on I will refer to them as a T10KD) tape.

The reader

Looking on the internet, tape drives refuse to come down in price, so the next obvious step is to borrow, buy, steal, or otherwise obtain a T10KD compatible drive.

Administrator message:

So far I am trying to buy a reader for tapes.

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