Quantum Corp says it has begun shipments of its DLT 8000 tape drives, and its partner Tandberg Data Inc says it will ship its own versions of the drives on September 1. The DLT 8000 (CI No 3,697) has native capacity of 40Gb and a 6Mbps transfer rate, a 15% increase in capacity and 20% performance boost over previous models. Tandberg is currently the only independent second source with a full line of DLTtape products. It recently introduced a DLT Autoloader. Quantum says over one million DLT tape drives and 30 million DLTtape media cartridges have now been shipped.
Earlier this month, Quantum signed a joint development agreement with Imation Corp for its next generation of digital linear tape – Super DLTtape. Imation, which currently markets DLTtape cartridges, will develop and market Super DLTtape under the terms of the agreement. Other partners with Quantum over Super DLT are the Fuji Photo Film Co, Read-Rite Corp and Tandberg.
Super DLTtape technology is expected to store from 100Gb to 500Gb of uncompressed data on a single cartridge, with transfer speeds of 10 Mbps to 40Mb/sec, while retaining backward compatibility with DLT. The format faces competition from the Linear Tape Open Consortium, led by IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Seagate Technologies Inc.
