Why the Exabyte VXA-1 drive?
There are two well-respected manufacturers of high capacity tape drives these days. Sony (with their AIT system) and Exabyte (with the VXA system.) Other kinds of tape drives (like Travan, DAT, DLT, and others) are either much lower capacity, or much more expensive or both. Both AIT and VXA use 8mm tapes, but they are not in any way compatible with each other. I chose VXA because I personally believe that Exabyte’s products are of higher quality than Sony’s. But that’s just my opinion. A lot of other people swear by Sony tape drives. I’m not going to try and argue against them. Exabyte makes two different variations of the VXA drive – the VXA-1 and the VXA-2. The VXA-1 is the less expensive model and writes to tapes at a lower capacity. The VXA-2 costs more but can write more to the same length tape. VXA tapes come in four lengths. Three of them are compatible with both VXA-1 and VXA-2. The fourth is VXA-2 only. They are: – V6 (62m) – 12GB on a VXA1 drive, 20GB on a VXA-2 – V10 (107m)
