Seagate Technology Inc has entered the mid-range server backup market with Sidewinder 50, a 3.5 inch form format tape drive based on Sony Corp’s AIT Advanced Intelligent Tape technology. It has a capacity of up to 50Gb with data compression (25Gb native) and transfers data at up to 6 Mb per second. It’s available in the third quarter: no prices given. Meanwhile, Sony is promising AIT-2 Advanced Intelligent Tape drives of up to 100Gb of capacity and 12 Mb per second transfer rates, which it is expecting to ship some time next year. The intelligence is in the memory in cassette option, a 16Kb programmable memory chip which holds the tape’s reference area, speeding up access to files and tape load time.
