Quantum's New Super DLTtape Drives

Home users probably don't use tape drives for backup anymore because CDR/RW is cheaper, faster, and generally more reliable. If you're an IT person who needs to back up more than 650MB, however, your options are pretty much limited to tape, magneto-optical, and redundancy (backing up to another off-site location). If you're sticking with tape, Quantum says its new Super DLTtape offer nearly three times the capacity of its DLTtape drives and provides read and write speeds that are nearly twice as fast. The Super SDLT 220 tape drive gives you 110 GB of native storage capacity per cartridge and an 11 MB/second sustained native data transfer rate. Using the built-in hardware based data compression, capacity and performance can be doubled for most data. The drives are available with Ultra2 SCSI LVD interfaces. The M1500 with Super DLTtape is available now, with an MSRP starting at $23,240 for a single drive unit. Super DLTtape is also available in the PowerStor L200 and P1000/P2000/P3000/P6000 Series automated tape libraries from Quantum. Sounds a tad expensive for a tape drive - but it's a new hardware product, so we thought we'd let you know about it.