In what it describes as the most comprehensive unveiling of products in its eight-year history, Exabyte Corp has brought forth nine new products – new tape drives and libraries for 8mm, 4mm and quarter-inch minicartridge media. Starting off with the biggest of the media, the Boulder, Colorado company says that its new Mammoth 8mm Cartridge Tape Subsystem can store 20Gb of data at 3M-bytes per second, before compression, four times better than its existing offering and with search speeds five times faster. Availability is scheduled for the current quarter at a price expected to be less than twice that of the current EXB-8505 8mm Cartridge Tape Subsystem. There are three new 4mm drives: the EXB-4404 which holds 4Gb of uncompressed data and has a transfer rate of 410K-bytes per second; and the EXB-4402 and EXB-4402c, with native capacity and transfer rate of 4G-bytes and 233K-bytes per second, respectively. The EXB-4404 and EXB-4402c offer data compression. The new quarter-inch subsystem – the EXB-2502 – more than doubles the capacity of the existing EXB-2501, though the company says that it will continue to sell the older model. The new version stores 2Gb and can transfer data at 505K-bytes per second. General availability of the EXB-2502 will be in second quarter 1994, with an OEM price of between $475 and $550 in quantities of 1,000. A version with built-in hardware compression is expected soon after. There are three new 8mm tape libraries (the EXB-210, EXB-440 and EXB-480) and Exabyte enters in the 4mm library market with the EXB-218. Depending on architecture, the 8mm libraries incorporate from two to four 8mm half-height drives and from 10 to 80 8mm data cartridges. The 8mm libraries have capacities ranging from 50Gb to up to 1.6Tb depending on the cartridges installed. Both the EXB-440 and EXB-480 will be available in the third quarter of 1994. The EXB-440 library is expected to have an end-user price of between $40,000 and $60,000. The anticipated end-user price of the EXB-480 with drivers and software is between $60,000 and $100,000. Prices for both libraries will vary depending on the configuration and software. The EXB-218 combines two 4mm drives and 18 4mm data cartridges to provide storage for up to 144Gb of data. In addition to expanding its drive and library offerings, Exabyte has also added two new members to the Exatape family of recording media – the 4mm Data Cartridge and the Mini Data Cartridge.
