DAT drives are primarily used in entry-level servers. The technology has been on the market for years; capacity is still limited to 20 GBytes net. For all that, the DDS4 cartridges are a good value and compact. The Tapestor DAT 40 fits in a 3 _" tray, but is also delivered with an adapter for 5 _" trays. The front panels for both versions are included.

Three unlabeled LEDs indicate drive status. These stand for cleaning, tape and drive. Steady and blinking lights indicate status as well as problems such as a high error rate, write or hardware faults.

At $825, the Tapestor DAT 40 from Seagate is one of the best-value drives in the test. The price per gigabyte is just $0.95.

Data is transferred at only 2.75 MB per second, however. This makes its transfer rate the lowest in the test field. And that is felt in longer backup times for large amounts of data. Nevertheless, the drive quickly restores individual files so that, in performance terms, the Seagate product comes out ahead of the DLT VS 80. The Tapestor DAT 40 finishes in fourth place in the overall rankings.

Seagate's SDT 240 is designed in half-depth. Frames are included in delivery for mounting in a server.