So I got my hands on this Digital Audio Tape recorder, and decided to record it like I did with my tape drive a few months ago. In the video I play back about a minute sample a couple of songs. I also demonstrate the skip feature.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rod03cMBNng[/media]
[B]Wait. What the hell is DAT?[/B]
DAT stores audio, as its name implies, digitally as opposed to in analog. DAT stores audio in the same format as a CD; that is 44.1 KHz uncompressed PCM audio. CDs can be copied to and from DAT tapes bit-perfectly. Similarly, it can also record a S/PDIF source losslessly. This means the audio quality is fantastic. Better than MP3. Way better than cassette. On top of that, DAT tapes are smaller than cassettes and use much less tape to store the same length of audio. The catch here is that the tape recorder itself was more mechanically complex, making the units larger and more expensive than cassette systems.
DAT was invented in the 80's as a medium to store digital recordings before they were edited and put onto a CD. It was really the only way considering that hard drives were not anywhere near up to the job at the time. DAT became really popular among pirates as it made CDs as easy to copy as the cassette did, but without the loss of audio quality.
[B]If it sounds so much better, lemme hear it.[/B]
Here is the DAT player compared to a (really cheap) cassette recorder. Like the above video, I captured the audio directly to provide a (semi)accurate comparison.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRzAOqzoDl4[/media]
I always thought it was weird that you could use tape to store digital data (like on HP's Ultrium system) but nobody used it for music. And now I've found out about the Digital Audio Tape, and now it makes sense. Thanks for the brief lesson
Such awesome quality on the DAT!
DAT quality
dat DAT
[img]http://i.imgur.com/5xdNqXM.png[/img]
DAT always seemed so horribly expensive, even after it was repalced by flash and hard disk recorders.
MiniDisc was always equally as good but cheaper.
[QUOTE=MIPS;40027430]DAT always seemed so horribly expensive, even after it was repalced by flash and hard disk recorders.
MiniDisc was always equally as good but cheaper.[/QUOTE]
Don't forget that Minidisc uses lossy compression, save the Hi-MD, which saw little market share.
I was always still so fascinated DDS tape, which is similar to this. Just because it could store so much, in like 1989 it could more than a gig. In the 80's that is just incredibly.
It still fascinates me (and confuses me) that even still today they are developing newer tapes. What really confuses me is the fact that many business apparently still use them for archiving.
[QUOTE=mysteryman;40030144]I was always still so fascinated DDS tape, which is similar to this. Just because it could store so much, in like 1989 it could more than a gig. In the 80's that is just incredibly.
It still fascinates me (and confuses me) that even still today they are developing newer tapes. What really confuses me is the fact that many business apparently still use them for archiving.[/QUOTE]
I guess a tape is easier to destroy than say a harddrive?
With new tape drives, you can get 2.5 TB for $35 a cartridge. That might have something to do with it.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
[QUOTE=mysteryman;40030144]I was always still so fascinated DDS tape, which is similar to this. Just because it could store so much, in like 1989 it could more than a gig. In the 80's that is just incredibly.
It still fascinates me (and confuses me) that even still today they are developing newer tapes. What really confuses me is the fact that many business apparently still use them for archiving.[/QUOTE]
In the event you didn't see it, you might find this interesting:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCmA43QNgAE[/media]
[QUOTE=Usernameztaken;40030256]I guess a tape is easier to destroy than say a harddrive?[/QUOTE]
Tapes don't fail as often, they can hold information much more densely and they don't require near as much power to operate. They're also cheaper per unit than a harddisk.
Access times are alot longer on them, though; but that doesn't matter when you're backing up information.
It is, however, completely impractical to use the tapes now. As since it is a proprietary format in addition to it being magnetic tape. Solid state non volatile mediums are increasingly advancing in technology, speeds, and space while the price substantially decreases. The reading speeds are just not worth it for the price of tapes and the heft cost of the proprietary machines you need to read them.
Also where are your figures for the power consumption, if anything i would be willingly to bet money that to maintain a significant archive with magnetic tape, the total cost of operation would be much larger than if you were to use something like an optical media format or ssd format.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
And i mean large archives. Because for the last 3 years, if you were a small business. It's literally just substantially easier to keep archives either on location on your servers, or use cloud storage services.
[QUOTE=mysteryman;40030708]It is, however, completely impractical to use the tapes now. As since it is a proprietary format in addition to it being magnetic tape. Solid state non volatile mediums are increasingly advancing in technology, speeds, and space while the price substantially decreases. The reading speeds are just not worth it for the price of tapes and the heft cost of the proprietary machines you need to read them.
Also where are your figures for the power consumption, if anything i would be willingly to bet money that to maintain a significant archive with magnetic tape, the total cost of operation would be much larger than if you were to use something like an optical media format or ssd format.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
And i mean large archives. Because for the last 3 years, if you were a small business. It's literally just substantially easier to keep archives either on location on your servers, or use cloud storage services.[/QUOTE]
Proprietary? What? I can get LTO tape drives from at least 4 different manufacturers.
The read spead for an LTO-6 tape is 160 MB/s, my HDD is less than that.
Optical media is insane to use for professional backups and you must be joking about SSDs.
Tapes become much cheaper the larger your operation is.
[QUOTE=mysteryman;40030708]It is, however, completely impractical to use the tapes now. As since it is a proprietary format in addition to it being magnetic tape. Solid state non volatile mediums are increasingly advancing in technology, speeds, and space while the price substantially decreases. The reading speeds are just not worth it for the price of tapes and the heft cost of the proprietary machines you need to read them.
Also where are your figures for the power consumption, if anything i would be willingly to bet money that to maintain a significant archive with magnetic tape, the total cost of operation would be much larger than if you were to use something like an optical media format or ssd format.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
And i mean large archives. Because for the last 3 years, if you were a small business. It's literally just substantially easier to keep archives either on location on your servers, or use cloud storage services.[/QUOTE]
I'll give you a break because I don't think you work in an enterprise environment but that is very incorrect.
First off I do partially agree with the expense and how they are somewhat proprietary. But more in a sense that if you need to pull data from an old tape it can be difficult. If the company needs data pulled from a tape written in the early 90s (for discovery due to litigation, etc) it can cause a huge headache for IT staff. Generally what happens is we dust off the old DAT drives only to realize that mechanical shit that hasn't been powered on for 20+ years usually doesn't work.
But on your other points like power consumption for most businesses big enough that need to backup to tape is almost always no concern. It is either included in the building lease agreement or they don't really care because they really don't need to. A tape drive isn't in operation 24/7, an enterprise level router probably uses 10x more power in a month than a tape drive will use in six.
What is most effective is relying on multiple methods of backup, a local copy on a server plus a weekly+monthly tape copy that is sent offsite for example. That way if the building burns down/floods/turns into a volcano/etc you still have the data necessary to get the company back on its feet. As for a cloud based solution, unless it resides in a second office owned by the same company in another location it is not really ideal. You have no control over the data or security measures put in place to protect it which is why most IT professionals steer clear of cloud based solutions, at least as their main backup strategy. Most offsite solutions are quicker if you need an emergency restore ASAP anyway. If you need 20TB of databases, email, and files there is no way you are going to be able to download that in a reasonable amount of time. With offsite storage these guys get your tapes to you in literally half an hour.
[QUOTE=mysteryman;40030708]It is, however, completely impractical to use the tapes now. As since it is a proprietary format in addition to it being magnetic tape. Solid state non volatile mediums are increasingly advancing in technology, speeds, and space while the price substantially decreases. The reading speeds are just not worth it for the price of tapes and the heft cost of the proprietary machines you need to read them.
Also where are your figures for the power consumption, if anything i would be willingly to bet money that to maintain a significant archive with magnetic tape, the total cost of operation would be much larger than if you were to use something like an optical media format or ssd format.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
And i mean large archives. Because for the last 3 years, if you were a small business. It's literally just substantially easier to keep archives either on location on your servers, or use cloud storage services.[/QUOTE]
I'm going to echo the sentiments of the couple posters above me in saying that literally ANY large corporation or company that has sensitive data files will use tape backup systems for a huge majority of that information. Magnetic tape, or at least HP's (because that's what I use at my internship) are rated to last for a minimum of 50 years. A standard HDD could not come close to 50 years of continuous read/write. SSDs are not an option because they are still very cost inefficient
And as someone who is involved (even if only slightly) with budgeting in regards to technology, it is much cheaper to use a tape system than it is to purchase the COMPUTERS necessary to handle SSDs for that kind of archival.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
Also the read speeds are fucking incredible on tapes. I was so surprised when I had to handle some of the administrator back-ups for the school so that I could re-image (read: re-install the OS and drivers) all the desktop iMacs. Honestly each of the 6 images only took like 20-30 minutes to read, write, and clone.
All right, i stand corrected. I still stand by what i said for smaller business though.
[editline]25th March 2013[/editline]
All right i don't stand by what i said for smaller business. That's not my field.
There's a DAT here with Cher's Believe on it.
I don't quite know what to say.
If you do more of these get a shotgun mic pointed right at that motherfucker. Then advertise it for ASMR. You get some crazy detailed sound out of that thing I bet.
Tapes are always kind of a odd thing, I never thought I'd trust them, but yet they are used for backups for such a long time and still considered a good method. But god damn do the inerds and how they work and move seems so awesome.
I always thought Digital Tapes would be a think for audio directly, but I never heard of DAT before.
The mechanism is actually really quiet. It makes sense, since this particular recorder is a portable unit meant for on-site recording. It's nowhere near as loud as the tape drive.
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