Tandberg VS-80 DLT-IV

This is an external DLT tape drive with a capacity of 40GB and transfer rates of 10.5GB/hour. DLT tapes have a higher shelf as well as operational life making it good for organizations having such requirements. In terms of performance it was slower than the rated speeds for normal backup and restore operations but in stream transfer rates it was fine. We were expecting some data compression with this drive as DLT is a widely used format, but the drive failed to compress our test data.

The drive comes with the standard edition of TapeWare backup software and has some diagnostic LEDs like tape error and head-clean.

The initial price of the drive is higher than Sony AIT-1 and AIT-2 drives but lower than the HP DAT 72. The cost per GB of the tape was quite high at Rs 70/GB, almost double that of HP DAT, but lower than the AIT drives. Can be a good buy because of high reliability of DLT tapes, but it is not one of the cost

efficient solutions.