Channel Register

Tandberg Data tells channel 'have some of DAT'

Contrary to any idea that manufacturing and selling removable RDX disk drives meant Tandberg Data was against SME tape products, the company is going to sell DAT drives and media products through its channel. Tandberg Data is working closely with HP on the release of DAT 320, the latest format, later this year. DAT (Digital …

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Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 09:58 GMT

Richard Porter

" the most popular and successful tape technology, numerically speaking, ever"

Gates Horns

with 16M drives sold. How many audio compact cassette drives were sold then?

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 10:50 GMT

Trygve Henriksen

16M drives? About the same as the number of tapes, then?

Coat

Because most who ever tries DAT backup will throw the piece of sh!it in the junk immediately, then flog the unused tapes on eBay, in the hope that some unsuspecting hi-fi enthusiast will buy them...

DAT tapes were never designed for the usage patterns they experience in a backup unit, with stops, starts and winding all the time. It stretches the tapes and eventually, they become unusable. (Sometimes as soon as after 4 or 5 sessions)

And often, a tape written to on one drive will be unreadable on another, so after some b@stard jams a crowbar through the server, or it gets flooded, you won't be able to restore your backup onto the replacement kit.

Mine's the one with the (unused)SLR cleaning tape in the pocket...

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 12:47 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@Trygve

Grenade

Couldnt agree more. Awful things. And if its a Sony manufactured drive, then its got buggy firmware to add to your woes. I would have recommended 8mm (now dead) over DAT anytime, and didnt like 8mm.

As much as I want to see Tandberg do something to get out of the mess they are in, I'm disappointed its through DAT. Its a toy format.

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 13:40 GMT

Matt Bryant

RE: Trygve

Boffin

As with all tape drives, the idea is to keep it streaming at a constant speed. If you use a poor backup tool, poor interface card or just do stupid jobs with your tapes then you will trash them pretty quickly. If, on the other hand, you are a bit smarter in how you go about it, you could still be using the same DAT tape for dozens of backups.

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 13:40 GMT

Trygve Henriksen

8mm?

Used that stuff on our Norsk Data ND-5700s...

Not as unreliable as DAT, but not much better.

The best that could be said about it was that it was smaller than the previous system we used.

(You know, those big spools... Before my time, luckily)

There WAS an even worse format than DAT, once.

VHS...

Anyway, I still have one or two of the DAT drives around, in case we need to restore a 10year old tape backup. Not that I believe that the drives work, or that we can get them to function in our servers.

The SLRs from the same time, though... You have to abuse a pretty big industrial electromagnet, and possibly a AG-3 assault-rifle to fail those tapes.

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 15:14 GMT

Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

170GB

WTF?

$700+ to backup 170GB @ 85BG an hour, at a time when 1TB disks are common. Why?

Bring back the knotted string reader I say...

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 15:14 GMT

Fraser

Hmm...

Two words spring to mind about DAT - Helical and Scan.

That is all you need to know about it.

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 21:06 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Mad

Thumb Down

You'd be mad to buy a DAT drive for backup. Temperamental and unreliable. Have you ever tried restoring data written by one DAT drive in another ? Bloody rubbish. You could buy a DLT drive in these capacities for similar money and have much more reliable backup, and most importantly, restore system.

Posted Tuesday 15th September 2009 21:06 GMT

Trygve Henriksen

@Matt

Of course I know that you get better results if the streamer can work uninterrupted, but...

Have you noticed how the SW scan the tape at the beginning of an operation?

Or what happens if something interrupts the data stream?

(Many backup tools will actually PAUSE if they run across a locked file, because the programmer thought that it'll 'probably soon be unlocked' or something)

And gods forbid, what if you need to do a restore?

Those operations NEVER seem to go without a lot of winding.

Backup media needs to be ROBUST!

And that's a word that can never be associated with DAT.

Posted Wednesday 16th September 2009 09:39 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@Matt

Alert

If you dont stream data then it will put strain on your hardware. But a DAT drive gets hit worse.

As Trygve said though you cant completely control your environment. Good backup software will do an element of buffering etc but bottlenecks will still occur.

Saying all that, it might not be an issue with the DAT drive and a modern disk. The compressed data rate of those plastic toys is 24MB/s. Uncompressed 1/2 that. So unless you hit a really nasty part of a disk (lots of really small files) its safe to assume the most basic backup product will be able to keep the DAT streaming.

I still wouldnt trust my data on them.

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