On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 09:20:45AM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> As long as we're talking drives and media (and I'm in the market), does 
> anyone have any experience with S-AIT?  According to my vendor, it has the 
> same smart compresser as AIT and a capacity of 500GB/tape (vs. 400GB for 
> LTO-3).  LTO-3 looks like it may be the winner on price, but if there's a 
> good reason to go S-AIT, I'm not averse to doing so.

I don't have any SAIT experience, but the last time I looked, the big
limitation for me was that nobody but Sony was selling a library with
SAIT drives in it, and Sony was only selling them in their high end tape
silos.  That may have changed since the last time I looked.  I seem to
remember maybe seeing a Spectra Logic box with a SAIT drive in it at a
conference sometime recently.  I know that Overland isn't offering them
in their Neo libraries, which is where I'd really like to see one.  If I
replace my Overland it'll probably be with another.  It's been highly
reliable.

Right now SAIT looks to me like it'll probably win out over LTO for
density and speed in the near term and in the long term, but helical
scan has always been harder to sell than linear tape.  The AIT
technology has been highly reliable for me and seems to be as reliable
for everyone else as well.  AIT may finally be the technology that gets
helical scan into the real enterprise market, but until you see an AIT
derivative in an STK silo for instance, it seems like SAIT is going to
remain a specialty product.

Who knows, maybe this has all changed in the past few months, or is in
the process of changing now.

AIT-4 sure looks pretty though.

Brandon
-- 
Pseudo-Random Googlism:  birthday is here; commemoration to continue