Refurbished 3490e Tape Drives are available from Sunstar in a variety of models as indicated below. Our complete 3490e tape drive sub-systems includes; software, cables & SCSI controller suited for your platform. 3490e Tape Drives read and write to 18, 36 and compressed 36 (ICRC) Tracks.

Introduced in 1991. Its 36-track head records 800 megabytes of data on a single tape. The IDRC option allows it to record up to 2400 megabytes on a single extended tape. 3490E tape drives were available from a variety of manufacturers with bus and tag, ESCON, or high voltage SCSI interfaces, and were capable of data transfer speeds up to 20MB per second.

While 3490E data cartridges are the same dimensions as 3480 cartridges, the tape media is the same only longer. 3490E tape is optimized for 36-track recording heads, instead of 18-track recording heads. Nevertheless, some 3480 tape drives can record on 3490E media.

Some 3490E tape drives are able to read tapes recorded by 3480 tape drives. Others can also write tapes that can be read by 3480 tape drives. But many 3490E tape drives can only read/write 36-track tapes