Digital Equipment Corp, so often at loggerheads with third party peripheral manufacturers, has decided it can’t do everything itself, and has joined forces with Cipher Data Products Inc to develop a new range of high-performance tape drives that will be compatible with all major hardware families. The drives will be based around DEC’s TF857, and the partners hope to offer performance and capacities superior to those offered by the current 8mm format, by Digital Audio Tape and by IBM Corp’s 3480. The forthcoming drive is being designed to give storage capacity of 2.6Gb per cart ridge, with total unattended storage capacity of 18.2Gb using an automat ic cartridge loader. It will have a 512Kb buffer that can be disabled in non-back-up applications to maintain data integrity, and a dual channel read-write head to increase the data transfer rate. There was no indica tion of when the drive would be out.
