REVIEWS

QIC Grows Up: Tandberg Data's Panther 5000

by Barry Gerber

Historically, QIC tape drives have played a distant second fiddle to 4mm DAT and 8mm helical scan drives in the enterprise networking market. QIC's reputation for low capacity and snail-slow speeds led to their use as backup devices for home computers and very small networks. But things have changed!

High-capacity QIC drives like Tandberg's Panther 5000 can backup as much as 5 GB and do it at very respectable speeds. Technically, the Panther is a great little drive, but it's not a good business choice. Media costs are high and it's not clear that high-capacity QIC will survive competition from other, more popular technologies.

Getting productive with the Panther 5000 was one of those rare no-brainers. We plugged the drive into the SCSI-2 circuit occupied by a Seagate hard disk and a Hewlett-Packard 1553A 4mm tape drive. Our test computer was a 90-MHz Pentium running Microsoft's Windows NT. After restarting the machine, Cheyenne's ARCServe, our favorite backup software for NT, recognized the new drive and we were off and backing up in seconds.

The drive ran flawlessly through several backup and restore tests. It consistently delivered backup speeds of 24 MBps without hardware compression. Compare that with 28 MBps from the HP drive under the same test conditions.

The 5000's near paperback-book-sized 3M [note: that's the company 3M, not the size 3MB] Magnus 2.5 QIC cartridges inspire confidence, especi ally when compared with their tiny 4mm and 8mm cousins. They look like they could survive a serious attack by a crazed gorilla or even an angry network manager. The Magnus 2.5's 1,200 feet of 1/4-inch tape can hold up to 5 GB with compression. Late this Summer, Global Computer Supplies was selling 2.5 cartridges for $50--more than five times the asking price for comparable 4mm or 8mm cartridges. Prices will, of course, come down, if high capacity QIC is successful, but that's our chief concern.

3M's Data Storage Markets Division has spent megabucks developing and promoting high-capacity QIC, and other vendors besides Tandberg are expected to offer drives supporting the technology. Still, we wonder whether high-capacity QIC will catch on well enough to survive and prosper in a market dominated by ever-improving 4mm and 8mm tape systems. New DAT technologies like DDS2 and DDS3 promise high speed and high capacity at costs equal to or better than the Panther 5000's $1,400 price tag.

Committing the corporate jewels to any technology is risky. You want to be sure it will stick around. You also want the technology to be successful enough that vendors consistently take it to the edge, for example, by constantly striving to increasing capacity and performance or by building autoloaders for it. We expect that the Panther 5000 will enjoy limited popularity in shops already committed to QIC, primarily because of its backward compatibility with lower capacity tapes of the same size.

Barry Gerber can be reached at bgerber@nwc.com.

Panther 5000,
Tandberg Data,
(805) 579-1000; fax (805) 579-2555.

October 15, 1995