The Ardat division of Archive Corp, Costa Mesa, California has developed and begun shipping evaluation units of what it claims is the industry’s fastest Digital Audio Tape drive for computer data storage (that name is going to have to go – no-one much uses it for audio any more): with a native transfer rate of 366K-bytes per second, the Turbo Python DAT offers twice the performance of any other DAT drive being shipped today, Ardat says, adding that when combined with industry-standard DDS-DC data compression, the Turbo Python stores up to 8Gb on a single cassette with a maximum transfer rate of up to 1.46M-bytes per second; it will be available in production quantities starting in October and pricing will be announced prior to product availability.
