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The Storstation AIT-3Ex is the latest generation of Sony’s tiny AIT (Advanced Intelligent Tape) drive.
It offers a native capacity of 150GB per cartridge and a sustained throughput rate of 18Mbytes/sec.
These figures represent a 50 per cent capacity and performance hike compared with existing Sony AIT-3 drives, for the same money.
Whether you need this extra space and speed will depend on what you want to back up.
However, the AIT-3Ex is a good match for the disk capacities on offer in the small-business server market, especially when the built-in hardware compression is applied, although Sony claims a somewhat optimistic 390GB per cartridge in such cases.
That’s a lot more than most of the competition predicts and we certainly didn’t manage to get anywhere near that figure in our tests, conducted using the Symantec Backup Exec for Windows Servers (Quickstart Edition) included in the box.
However, compression did have an appreciable effect, boosting capacity by around 40 per cent on average using our sample datasets.
Overall throughput was good, the Sony drive taking a full backup of the 160GB Sata data disk in our Pentium 4-based test server in just over two hours.
We used an internal model with an Ultra160 SCSI interface for those tests, the AIT drive slotting easily into a standard half-height expansion slot using the adapter provided.
Rails for mounting in an HP Proliant are also included and there’s even a 3.5in bezel, if needed.
A self-powered external version is also available (£1,163 ex VAT) with all models able to read and write AIT-3 format tapes, although you only get the full capacity and performance with AIT-3Ex media.
A good fit with the typical small-business server, the Sony AIT-3Ex offers over four times the capacity of the DAT format.
However, it faces competition from other half-height products (such as the Tandberg 420LTO), which offer yet more capacity and performance at much the same price.
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