Product Reviews

Storage specialist LaCie claims the AIT1 U&I is the first backup device to provide both USB and IEEE-1394 FireWire support. Aimed at server and workstation backup, the product is built around a Sony AIT1 tape drive, which comes clothed in the well-designed and solidly built chassis that is LaCie's trademark.

The AIT1 tape drive is no newcomer to the backup market, having been introduced by Sony back in 1998. However, its strengths have always been a high native storage capacity and performance, with this latest version delivering 35GB and 240MB/min respectively. A drawback has been its high price, but since the DDS format is no longer being developed Sony has dropped this significantly to allow the AIT1 to compete in the DDS-3 market as a suitable replacement.

The drive comes supplied with Dantz

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Retrospect Desktop 5.6 backup software. This is realistically the only choice, as not only does it support both Macintosh and Windows PC environments, but it's also one of few products that supports USB and FireWire tape drives. Installation on our Windows 2000 Server test system proved to be a simple three-step process, which required the backup software and drivers loaded first, followed by tape drive connection.

For performance testing, we used a 2GB mixture of data, and with the drive connected to a USB 2 PCI adaptor card it proceeded to deliver average backup and verification rates of 238MB/min and 258MB/min respectively. These are impressive results, as earlier testing has shown that a standard AIT1 drive connected to a SCSI host adaptor will return similar speeds. Tape read rates were just as good, with 1.5GB of test data restored at an average of 241MB/min. However, performance tumbles with a USB 1.1 interface, as our tests returned speeds similar to those you would expect from a DDS-3 tape drive of around 53 to 56MB/min for each task.

The AIT1 U&I looks ideal for both server and workstation backup and is competitively priced - it currently costs less that Sony's own StorStation AIT90e external SCSI tape drive. You're restricted to the bundled Retrospect backup software, but this is no bad thing because it's a sophisticated product that offers a good range of features.