Product Reviews

Product roadmaps for most tape formats can be works of fiction, leaving users questioning the wisdom of investing. Despite DDS being dead and buried in 2001, Seagate and HP have decided to dig up its corpse and attempt a fifth generation, while the next step in Quantum's ValuSmart format is two years overdue. The mid-range backup market sees better service, with the first two generations of SuperDLT released within a year of each other, and we now have the second phase in the Ultrium format.

HP's Ultrium 460e is the first to market, and quoted native speed and capacity look good. The Ultrium 2 format offers a data rate of 30MB/sec, while the solid 1/2in cartridges store a massive 200GB. Two

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notable modifications have been made to increase performance - recording density has been upped to 512 tracks and the internal buffer has been boosted to a healthy 64MB.

For testing, the drive was connected to a dedicated Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI adaptor in a Pentium III/866 server equipped with 1GB of memory and running Windows 2000 Server SP 2. Mass storage was handled by a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 hard disk linked to an Adaptec Ultra320 adaptor. Veritas Backup Exec (BE) 9 (see p189) and Computer Associates' ARCserve 9 took care of backup software duties, and the drive was asked to back up, verify and restore 6.5GB of data.

The Ultrium 460e is the fastest mid-range tape drive we've seen by a huge margin. It aced the backup tests, delivering a whopping 1,887MB/min and 1,811MB/min for ARCserve and BE respectively. Verification for BE's tape read test soared to a staggering 2,099MB/min. Restoration speeds of 971MB/min and 925MB/min were disappointing, but it's still faster at this task than the SDLT 320.

The Ultrium 460e knocks everything else into a cocked hat, and is unlikely to be beaten for some time. Companies that ditched their existing tape formats to jump on the Ultrium bandwagon in 2001 can breathe easy, as this second generation delivers on all counts.