Sony AIT-1 Delivers Fast Backup

Sony’s new AIT-1 Turbo SATA internal PC tape drive is fast, reliable and can even be placed on standard rack-mounted environments. Priced at $620, AIT-1 is suitable for enterprise storage as well as low-cost storage solutions.

The drive takes up less internal space than competing PATA drives, which use wide ribbons and are limited to 18 inches between connecting interfaces. Although it is one of the smallest Sony SATA drives, AIT-1 has a native capacity of 40 Gbytes with a 6-MBps sustained transfer rate. At a compression of 2.6:1, Sony’s tape drive can store up to 104 Gbytes. Compression is handled by an Adaptive Lossless Data Compression (ALDC) algorithm. Sony achieved a 40-Gbyte capacity in such a small AIT tape by using a helical scan recording head. This technology increases performance and reduces wear and tear on tapes.

Under intense testing, the drive’s high performance won the CRN Test Center engineers’ admiration. Engineers created a batch backup routine that wrote over a TAIT1-40 data cartridge five times. A BrightStor ARCserve Backup was used. The transfer rate was identical to specifications with no loss of data after performing different checks on all five copies.

Sony did a great job designing this drive for reliability. The AIT-1 Turbo drive’s cooling system is isolated from the tape’s mechanical compartment so no dust from the fan can touch the tape.

The drive also has an automatic head-cleaning system and a leader block tape threading system to simplify tape loading. This is a good preventative maintenance feature.

The AIT-1 tape drive is backward-compatible with the older AIT-E Turbo media, so customers can interchange between two media formats.

Sony also offers AIT tapes with a unique 64-Kbit memory chip built into the cartridge to contain a tape’s system log, search map and any customized user information. The technology, called Remote Memory-In-Cassette (R-MIC), was compatible with ARCserve and worked quite well during testing.