You’ll squeeze 40 gig on one DDS tape next year That’s because HP announced it plans to develop a high-capacity DAT drive using the new Digital Data Storage-4 (DDS-4) format, recently adopted by the DDS Manufacturers Group. HP said its 3.5-inch form-factor product, expected to be available in the second half of 1999, will comply with the DDS-4 definition, providing 20Gb native capacity and 40Gb with typical data compression on a new and longer 150-meter DDS-4 tape. With a low-voltage differential SCSI (LVDS) interface, the expected data transfer rates will range from 1Mb/second to 6Mb/second. HP said its drives will be designed to be backward-compatible, read-compatible with DDS-DC and read- and write-backward compatible with DDS-2 and DDS-3 format tapes. The higher capacity is realized through the increase in tape length, a 25 percent reduction in the width of the tracks written on the tape and a correspondingly tighter specification for the required straightness of the tracks. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved