Tandberg SDLT 220 Tape Drive

This external SDLT tape drive uses SDLT tape I data cartridges, and is backward read compatible with DLTtape IV cartridges. It has a native capacity of 110 GB/220 GB uncompressed/compressed. The actual formatted capacity of the cartridge came to 108 GB. We compared it against Sony’s AIT-3 drive, reviewed last month, having 100 GB native capacity.

We used 10 GB of normal office data for testing.

The Tandberg drive matched its rated transfer rate of 11 MBps, while AIT-3 gave 11.4 MBps, slightly lower than its rated 12 MBps. Tandberg was better with backup if we compare rated vs actual transfer rates achieved by both. On the restore front, Sony was ahead of Tandberg, giving 10 MBps as against 7.5 MBps of the latter. Tandberg gave a better compression ratio of 1.03:1 against 1.02:1 of Sony. 

Coming to price, the AIT-3 is an internal drive priced at Rs 1,60,000, while Tandberg is an external drive priced at Rs 2,15,000, and its internal model costs Rs 1,86,000. The running cost of tape media for Sony is Rs 40.50 per GB, which is lower than Tandberg’s Rs 44.54 per GB. Overall, though Tandberg drive is more expensive, it has the advantage of using a more prevalent technology in the industry, which could translate to better support.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T
Price	:	Rs 2,15,000 (drive); Rs 4,900 (media)(three year warranty)
Key specs	:	SCSI Interface, backward read compatible with DLTtape IV cartridge, good backup time, but slower restore speed than Sony AIT-3 drive.
Contact	:	Tandberg Data, Singapore.
Tel	:	6396 0786.
E-mail	:	tandberg2@vsnl.net

Anoop Mangla