Exabyte EXB-8500CS 8mm SCSI Tape Drive 5/10GB 5.25 Full Height Internal

Exabyte EXB-8500CS 8mm SCSI Tape Drive 5/10GB 5.25 Full Height Internal

The Exabyte EXB-8500CS is a 5.25" full-height internal 8mm helical scan tape drive with a SCSI interface, offering 5 GB native and 10 GB compressed storage capacity. It connects via SCSI and was designed for installation in workstations, servers, and rackmount systems with a standard 5.25" full-height bay. The label on this unit confirms model 8500CS, Intel P/N 309071-005, and a manufacture date of December 1993.

Specifications & What's Included

• Manufacturer: Exabyte
• Model: EXB-8500CS (8500CS)
• Intel P/N: 309071-005
• CEI P/N: 850012-166
• FECODE: 8CC-0730 / 309685-000
• EECODE: 8CE-0177 / 014915-011
• Tape format: 8mm helical scan
• Native capacity: 5 GB
• Compressed capacity: 10 GB (2:1 compression)
• Interface: SCSI
• Form factor: 5.25" full-height internal
• Manufacture date: December 1993
• Unit only — no tape cartridges, cables, or software included

Applications

The Exabyte 8500 series was among the most widely deployed 8mm tape drives of the early-to-mid 1990s, used for data backup and archival storage in Unix workstations, file servers, and departmental computing environments. Exabyte's helical scan drives became a standard backup medium in Sun Microsystems, SGI, HP, and DEC workstation environments of that era, where SCSI was the dominant storage interface. The 8mm format offered substantially higher capacity than QIC and 4mm DAT drives of the same period, making it attractive for backing up large file systems. Today, these drives are primarily sought by legacy system administrators maintaining older Unix or proprietary systems that still require 8mm SCSI tape for backup or data recovery, and by collectors and enthusiasts of early-1990s workstation hardware.