History (1997): Hitachi in 8mm Tape Drive

Although we haven’t yet had confirmation directly from Hitachi, the Japanese firm is apparently set to make its debut in 8mm cartridge drives with a 3.5-inch form factor device called MT8MI.

Its specs are quite similar to Exabyte’s Mammoth: 20GB non-compressed capacity, transfer rate of 3MB/s, but with MP++ tape (162m long) rather than the AME (metal evaporated) tape used by Exabyte.

A more important difference, however, is in the cost: Hitachi’s unit should cost nearly half as much Mammoth, and will be able to read and write media previously written by Exabyte 8200, 8500 and 8500C drives.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 109, published on February 1997.