On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 at 9:36am, Brandon D. Valentine wrote

> 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

On their website now I see the CSM-20 -- 1-2 drives, 20 tapes, 5U.  
Qualstar also sells a higher end one -- 1-4 drives, 33 tapes, and 
expandable.

> 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.

Yup, I like Overland a lot as well.  My AIT-3 changer is a LoaderExpress, 
and the LTO-3 quote I got is for a Neo-2000.  As you noted, they're 
(still) not doing SAIT.

> AIT-4 sure looks pretty though.

But still "only" 200GB/tape, which for me isn't a compelling upgrade over 
AIT-3.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University