QUANTUM'S LATEST SUPER DLT drive is a monster. With 800GB of native capacity (1.6TB compressed), the DLT-S4 easily beats its competition. Sony's SAIT and Sun's StorageTek T10000 drives both offer 500GB native, while the latest and greatest LTO-3 drive tops out at 400GB.
"Tape is becoming more of an archival medium," says Mark O'Malley, Quantum's manager, strategic marketing, storage devices, putting a premium on capacity over performance. Case in point: While the DLT-S4 has 2.6 times the capacity of the previous generation SDLT 600, it features only 1.6 times the performance: 60MB/sec vs. 36MB/sec native throughput.
DLT-S4 media costs, meanwhile, are very low. With a target street price of $100, DLT-S4 media will cost approximately $0.06/GB, which is less than half the price of LTO-3 ($0.14/GB).
The drive has a target street price of $4,495, and is available as a standalone model or in some Quantum libraries. It includes DLTSage monitoring, security features and optional WORM.
--Alex Barrett
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This was first published in April 2006