Disadvantages of solid state media (was Re: Advantages...)

On 24 Apr 2012 at 12:30, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: It was intended mostly for laptop users--a 2mm helical-scan tape. I received one of the early evaluation unit. Datasonix made the claim that the thin 2mm tape width was no problem, that they could compensate for stretch. The only way you could get more blank media was to place a phone order to Datasonix, who would then send you a Fedex envelope with two cartridges in it--i.e. no retailer carried the media. Whether it was specially formatted for the Pereos, I don't know. The software was very large for a simple backup. The DOS driver had over a 100KB RAM footprint and the user interface was larger. Datasonix would divulge no details of the hardware interface at all; it was apparently proprietary with nothing like a plain ASPI interface. We were unable to obtain more than one unit to determine interoperability between units. I couldn't get reliable performance--you'd take forever to write a tape and then you couldn't read it back. Worse, the Datasonix government sales rep lied to one of the GSA people and based a sale on the assurance that we approved of the drives, which we didn't--as a matter of fact, we were pretty explicit in our refusal. I think it was only about 50 units, but our customer wasn't happy when he found out that we had no intention of supporting that little unit. Don't get me wrong--the concept was interesting--a unit not much larger than a pack of cigarettes that ran on a couple of AA batteries and could hold a gig on a cartridge the size of a postage stamp. It was the implementation that doomed the thing. There were some retail sales after bankruptcy of Datasonix in 1996, mostly through a mail-order clearance place. By 2000, the unit was pretty much forgotten. http://web.archive.org/web/20010331195911/http://datasonix.com/Default .htm (Wayback link to the clearance place) --Chuck