Tape On The Cheap—Drives Under $1,500 - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2000 by Mark Brownstein

Tape Wars continue. In fact, they're probably heating up with such upstarts as Benchmark and Ecrix chipping away at the low end, Exabyte's Mammoth 2 and Sony's AIT-2 fighting out the 8mm battles in the $2,000-3,000 range, and Super DLT and LTO poised to duke it out for market share that was once almost exclusively the territory owned by DLT. Throw in Tandberg Data's SLR 50 and some interesting drives at the lower price range and it looks like a real fight is brewing.

Realizing that backup is not just for large IT organizations (and for many it makes sense to leave it on the desktop), this article will look at drives that are positioned in the relatively low reaches of tape drives. Arbitrarily, I chose a $1,500 street price to represent the top of this scale. Surprisingly, many drives met that basic criterion--drives ranging from low capacity, slow, last generation drives selling for as little as $150 or $200; a lot of more sophisticated siblings with capacities ranging from 2GB to 8GB native and many more interesting drives.

In order to create a manageable list, it was important to set other criteria beyond the mere price point. Thus, only drives with native tape capacities of at least 10GB were included. This is not to say that lower capacity drives are not important--on my daughter's desktop, a drive with a 5GB native capacity would probably do fine. My wife's computer may be a different matter, probably requiring 10-20GB native capacity. I won't even hint at what I may need to do a full backup. The point here is that, for the purposes of this article, any drive with native capacity below 10GB wasn't included, to keep the list small, as well as providing a focus on drives that may find a place on desktops with more data to store, or as backup devices for small networks.

Drive prices were obtained from a number of sources, including a retail online computing equipment store and pricing provided by the manufacturers. Drive capacities are native, uncompressed capacities. Depending on the type of data being compressed, the rule of thumb is that the amount of data that can be stored, compressed, onto the tape is roughly twice that of the native data. Transfer rates were obtained from the manufacturer and/or drive retailer spec sheets. Finally, performance figures were grouped by technology--DDS 3 drives, for example, all feature the same native capacity and it is assumed that transfer rates were also similar.

Although the drives within a specific technology type (i.e., DDS 3) had similar specifications, many factors influenced the pricing. These included items bundled with the drives (backup software, media, cables, etc.), whether the drive was internal or external (external drives cost more), warranty period, and intangibles (all other things being equal, one manufacturer may charge a higher price because, perhaps, all other things may not be equal and the perceived quality or support provided by one manufacturer may be worth more to a consumer than a drive from another company).

Travan 5

The Travan 5 drive is the latest and possibly last in a series of linear tape technologies. Travan has deep roots, evolving from a few hundred megabytes capacity to its current 10GB native capacity.

Travan 5 drives are offered by Tecruar, Hewlett-Packard, and others, and are backward compatible with tapes written using earlier Travan versions. Where backward compatibility is important, the Travan 5 drives may be especially useful, providing the compatibility, while also delivering higher capacity than earlier versions.

Tecmar offers a version of the drive with what it describes as "network" features--power assisted load, flush loading, and other features, but with a 1MB/sec native transfer rate, Travan 5 probably lacks the performance to make it useful for all but the least demanding small network. Hewlett-Packard chose not to implement network features on its drive, believing that there wouldn't be much demand for such features on a drive with these specifications.

Although the price for Travan 5, ranging from the mid $300s into the $400 and higher, is not bad for a backup device. OnStream, with higher capacity and a similar price point, is a strong challenger.

OnStream

OnStream is an interesting series of drives. The technology uses multiple heads, all writing simultaneously, to record multiple tracks of data onto the tape media. The DI30, with an IDE interface has a native transfer rate of 1MB/sec, in line with that of the Travan 5. However, its 15GB native capacity and sub-$300 price make it a strong competitor to Travan 5.

Further, OnStream has demonstrated the ability of the drive to playback streaming MPEG video, showing the drive's ability to continuously stream data without interruption. Additionally, the drives are shipped with software that can stream ongoing changes to data, in effect, mirroring a system to OnStream tape.

SCSI versions of the OnStream drive are currently offered in native capacities of 15 and 25GB with faster transfer rates. The SC30, with 15GB native capacity, has a native transfer rate of 2MB/sec, while the SC50, with 25GB native capacity, has a native transfer rate of 3MB/sec. The SC70, with a native capacity of 35GB, was recently announced. Respectable capacities, adequate performance, and relatively reasonable price points (the SC50 is less than $900) make OnStream an interesting technology to watch.