Pardon my ignorance but I visited your site and did not see any mention of
this M2 format?  Where can I get details on it?

David




 -----Original Message-----
From:   Stephen Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
Sent:   Friday, January 26, 2001 11:50 AM
To:     'retro-talk'
Subject:        RE: Purchasing a new system

Definitely.  Every technology needs streaming data for optimized
performance.

One cool thing about M2, it has a huge buffer (32MB).  AIT-2 has 8MB.  M2
uses this larger buffer to help adjust for varying host speeds.  M2 can vary
its tape speed to match the host.  With so much memory, it can cache more
files and flush the buffer accordingly.

M2 is more expensive than the AIT series, but less expensive than a DLT
8000.  I personally don't know why anyone would buy a DLT 8000 knowing M2 is
2x faster, 50% larger per tape and costs less.  Only guys who need backward
read compatibility have been buying DLT from us these days.  Now that they
know generation I of the SDLT (SuperDLT) will not be backward compatible
with previous DLT formats, many of them have been moving to AIT and M2
(which promise larger capacities with future generations and complete
backward compatibility).  This explains why you can find so many DLT drives
on eBay.

Steve
Cybernetics
www.cybernetics.com


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf
Of David Ross
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2001 11:22 AM
To: retro-talk
Subject: Re: Purchasing a new system


> DLT has not addressed that issue.  Since linear pulls the tape across the
> heads at a faster rate (150 inches per second vs helical scan's
.5"/second),
> it requires streaming -- otherwise you end up "shoe-shining".  This
> reposition is very intense on the heads/tape of a linear drive.
>
> This applies to more than just DLT.  Anything linear can suffer from this.
>
> 4mm, AIT and M2 are not plagued with this problem.

Not really. AIT and DAT and I assume M2 spin the heads and slow down the
tape but the relative speeds are in the same neighborhood. (I assume
it's easier to spin the heads faster than move the tape faster which is
why DLT appears to be falling behind in the race.) Anyway, you still
need to keep the data flowing at the speed of the drive or it will stop
streaming and get into tape stuttering or rewinds to reposition. This
also causes a large loss in tape capacity as there's a lot of recording
overhead in starting or stopping a stream.


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