Much has been said about AIT tapes and how it is expected that they too will suffer the same fate as the DLTs (Digital Linear Tapes). Others, equally vehement, argue that as the AIT tape is an 8mm based format therefore it is not in direct competition with LTO tapes and will be able to thrive as before. All this may or may not be true but has little bearing on this article. That I know to be true for this article is meant to be an introduction of sorts to AIT-2 tape media, that and nothing else.
AIT-2 (Advanced Intelligent Tape) tape media is a format controlled by Sony. Typical AIT-2 tape cartridges have a 50 GB native and 130 GB compressed capacity. The compression ratio assumed for AIT products is 2.6:1 which is theoretically possible but is only likely to occur for tect documents, etc because other file types such as pictures etc do not compress very well.
Similarly transfer rates for AIT-2 tapes in general range from 6 MB/s native up to 12 MB/s compressed. AIT-2 tapes have double the capacity and double the transfer rates as well. As AIT tapes use a different encoding mechanism, therefore they have a better compression ratio (2.6:1).
Some other important facts about AIT-2 tapes are that the WORM (Write Once Read Many) cartridge in the AIT line was first introduced in AIT-2 tapes. Turbo variants of AIT-2 tapes were also launched that have 80 GB native capacities (and 208 GB compressed) and 12 MB/s native transfer rates. One of the most commendable features in the AIT-2 Turbo variant is the R-MIC (Remote - Memory In Cassette) chip that helps speed up data access. As they say time is money and anything that saves time therefore saves money and who wouldn't want that?
While a lot of information is available regarding AIT-2 tapes throughout the Web, some sites are available that have a lot of information regarding Sony AIT tape media. One such is Tape4Backup and while it is not a specialist site for AIT-2 tapes, it does have a lot of information regarding the more important aspects of AIT-2 tapes.
That's all for now although be on the lookout for more articles regarding other tape cartridges.
