Sony AITe-90-UL AIT-1

Monday, November 10, 2003

This drive is the same as the internal Sony AIT-1 drive but is an external drive with a USB and FireWire interface. With FireWire, you can even do daisy chaining with other devices. This drive is targeted at the personal backup market. The drive also uses the 35 GB AIT-1 tapes with a rated transfer rate of 14 GB/hour. Having a USB interface doesn’t mean it will perform poorer as compared to the SCSI drive. Normal backup and restore transfer rates were almost the same as the SCSI drive, but stream transfer was slightly slower, but that is fine. There was a difference in compression. While the SCSI drive provided 2% compression, it did not provide any at all.

Being a USB drive, it is not recognized by backup software and you have to use only the bundled software. The per GB cost of the tape is the same as the SCSI AIT-1, which is very high. The drive cost is also higher than the SCSI drive. But, if you cannot connect an IDE or SCSI backup device then this is the only option you have and it gives good performance also. The drive is also good for sharing among multiple servers, as having USB and FireWire interface, the drive is Hot Swappable. 

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