HP and Sony double team better storage tape format
DAT 320 gets fat
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Hewlett-Packard and Sony are putting their heads together again to make a denser breed of Digital Audio Tape drives and cassettes.
Even they worked together on the technology, both companies intend to roll out separate flavors of the new DAT 320 format in the first half of 2009.
DAT 320 will have backup speeds of up to 86GB per hour with 2:1 data compression. A single cartridge provides a maximum of 320GB capacity. That's roughly half the speed and twice the capacity of the one-year-old DAT 160.
Speed and capacity of the DAT 320 format will be the same for HP and Sony, according to Bob Conway, manager of tape marketing at HP. The differences will probably be in firmware — although the drives will be interchangeable between one another.
Conway expects the drive to sell for about $850, about the same as the DAT 160. A cartridge will cost approximately $36.
HP estimates the average tape customer uses six cartridges per drive. "That's solid data protection within reach of $1,200," said Conway. DAT 320 will also consume fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations, and is backwards compatible with DAT 160.
Admittedly, a very dense coil of storage tape tends not to inflame the baser passions.
"Rather than being sexy, it still has a place because of the overall cost of ownership and reliability through the whole spectrum of data protection and backup needs," said Conway.
Indeed, tape lets the small business CEO stoppeth her wallet, and will not hearken the voice of the disk vendor, vend he never so wisely.
Or something roughly to that effect.
"Small businesses can't afford to have a very swish disk to disk to tape regiment," said Conway.
That's probably more to the point. ®
COMMENTS
Umm...no
Sorry...but I don't really see bluray's working out too well either, we run a daily differential backups by thusday the backup takes about 160GB which would require me to change the cd 3 times. I have seen the night time cleaning crew, I don't think I will be training them anytime soon how to change cd's when they are full.
360GB for $36 or LTO3's 400/800 for $30 let me think????
But my favorite part of this article is twice the capacity for half the speed? So if I have a DAT160 and my backup grows to 161GB great I just get a new drive and some new tapes and I am backwards compatible life is good...oh wait 161gb backup takes twice as long now that sucks.
Thanks HP and Sony your the best!!!
Why not just buy a bluray burner and a couple 50GB BD-REs?
I would figure a bluray burner would have better data retention capability due to the hard coating on the disc, as well as having a longer shelf life, resistance to magnetics (Ever have some jackoff with a bulk tape eraser wipe the wrong tape?) and more compatibility with restoring the backed up data. After all, anyone can pick up a bluray reader for $150 and a burner for $300. Plus with the death of HD-DVD, it's likely going to be integrated into most PCs anyway, as it's currently the only large-capacity optical storage solution left. Plus you can pick up 25GB BD-REs for $15ish and the 50GBs for about $40. But the prices will drop within a year, and the capacity will rise, as Hitachi releases it's 100GB four layer discs, TDK' working experimental discs capable of holding 200 GB using six 33 GB data layers and Ritek already demonstrated up to 10 25GB layers in a disc for 250GB of storage...
Mine's the one with the pockets full of 50GB BD-REs.
Er... Even DAT 160 is an 8mm format
And likewise for DAT 320.
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