Patent ID: 7103741

Claim:
A tape drive apparatus comprising: tape-oriented recording and/or reproducing means for recording and/or reproducing information to and/or from a magnetic tape housed in a tape cassette furnished as a recording medium, said tape cassette being loaded in the apparatus; memory accessing means for accessing a memory which is incorporated in said tape cassette furnished as said recording medium and which at least holds management information for write and/or read operations to and/or from said magnetic tape, said memory accessing means writing and/or reading information to and/or from said memory following the accessing; memory-oriented information acquiring means for acquiring identification information from said memory through an access operation thereto performed by said memory accessing means, said identification information being stored in said memory as part of said management information and assigned uniquely to said tape cassette so as to distinguish said tape cassette from other tape cassettes; tape-oriented information acquiring means for acquiring identification information from said magnetic tape through an access operation thereto performed by said tape-oriented recording and/or reproducing means, said identification information being recorded in a predetermined area on said magnetic tape and supposed to be the same in content as the memory-stored identification information; determining means for determining whether there is a match between said memory-stored identification information acquired by said memory-oriented information acquiring means on the one hand and the tape-stored identification information acquired by said tape-oriented information acquiring means on the other hand; and operation controlling means for controlling the recording and/or reproduction of information to and/or from said recording medium by controlling the operation of said tape-oriented recording and/or reproducing means at least in accordance with a result of the determination made by said determining means.