Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!coherent!next!mmeyer From: mmeyer@next.com (Morris Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT Religion Message-ID: <250@next.com> Date: 1 Oct 90 18:39:54 GMT References: <448@news.nd.edu> <2444@lectroid.sw.stratus.com> <872@toaster.SFSU.EDU> Reply-To: mmeyer@next.com (Morris Meyer) Organization: NeXT, Inc. Lines: 25 In article melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: >Isn't Sony about to release DAT here in America? I don't think it >will be a commercial success if that is all the longer the head >assembly will last; consumers won't tolerate it. CD players used to be >expensive too. The prices of DAT players will drop after the 2nd >generation machines are released. 40 (times $4.00) disks or 1 DAT >cassette(around $10)? > >-Mike Granted once DAT players take off the internals of a DAT player will start to drop in price. That however does not account for the front end electonics required to make a solid backup solution. The Exabyte 8mm tape drives go to incredible amounts of effort to get hard error rates down to 1e-13 (*). They put a 500 byte error correction section at the end of each 1000 byte segment of data. In doing so, they can correct hundreds of one and two bit errors, as well as completely correct a 200 bit long burst error. All of this costs money. morris meyer (mmeyer@next.com) software engineer NeXT OS Group * - Figures quoted from memory...might be off somewhat.