Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watcgl!imax!dave
From: dave@imax.uucp (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Re: Experience with DAT drives?
Message-ID: <1990Apr11.010905.2610@imax.uucp>
Date: 11 Apr 90 01:09:05 GMT
References: <798@cluster.cs.su.oz> <1990Apr9.183829.16768@sobeco.com>
Reply-To: dave@imax.com (Dave Martindale)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Imax Systems Corporation, Oakville Ontario
Lines: 19

I'll put in another vote of confidence for the Exabyte drives.

I have two of them.  I do use them for backups, but the main reason
I have them is to store images.  At 36 Mb per frame, and 24 frames per
second, that's a lot of bytes per second of animation.  Even the 240 Kb/sec
that the Exabyte provides is really rather slow - that's 2.5 minutes to
read a single image.  The 180 Kb/s rate of a DAT drive would be almost
intolerable.  And storing only 1/2 as much per tape would require changing
tapes twice as often when processing.  Even if I had a jukebox, I'd
have to reload it twice as often.

They've been quite reliable; either one will read tapes written on the
other, plus tapes from two other off-site Exabytes that I've used.  I have
had problems exactly once: "write data" errors while writing a new tape,
and cleaning the drive seemed to fix that.

I hear Exabyte has announced a new drive that doubles the capacity of
a tape, doubling the transfer rate at the same time (probably by just
doubling the linear recording density).  I eagerly look forward to it.