jxh@netcom.UUCP (Jim Hickstein) (04/12/90)
Does anyone have any experience, good or bad, with the Gigatrends
Digital Audio Tape (DAT) file backup drive? Specifically, what are the
merits of the arguments of my brother the computer salesman, who
represents Tech Data, their exclusive national distributor, namely:
1. DAT has better error performance than an analog medium, i.e. 8mm video.
Something like one error in 100,000 Gigabytes (I make that 1.0E-14, but he
remembered a 23 in there somewhere. hmm.).
2. Gigatrends will [someday] produce a drive that can randomly access
a file among 10GB in 4 seconds. That's four seconds, folks.
3. Gigatrends uses a more complete DAT standard than that which HP, among
others, went with; one which will give better access times, at least.
Ironically, HP did not get to market sooner in spite of their early
adoption of a standard.
4. Novell users, and the LAN market in general, [will?] embrace the
Gigatrend offering, driving down the price for those of us in the
rarified heights (:-) of Sun networks.
My own responses to these are:
1. No tape is digital. The *overall* performance is a greater function
of the quality of the read/write electronics, especially as transports
and media get better, and the technology uses saturation recording (I'm
talking through my hat, here) rather than analog. This argument applies
as well to 9-track tapes as it does to DAT. I guess 8mm video, unmodified,
is truly analog, but recent articles in here indicate that Exabyte
8mm drives aren't.
2. Really? How?
3. What? (I really have to start paying attention to the standards
efforts in these areas.) Could someone educate us on the current
state of the standards art? What features? What performance?
(And, BTW, I resent having to exert so much effort in research in these
areas just to buy a product without getting screwed.)
4. Won't this market mean simply a clamor for the dollars, resulting in
a plethora of mutually-incompatible offerings, eventually followed
by a shakeout (of *my* box, naturally) two years later, about the time
that another format overtakes us and the whole thing starts over, again?
I may be cynical, but this is nothing: ask anyone. :-)
So the question is twofold:
Does either of us know anything factual about any of this, after all?
and,
What should I buy?
Help!
--
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Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre;
nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.
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Jim Hickstein, Teradyne/Attain, San Jose CA, (408) 434-0822 FAX -0252
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