Mammoth cleans up

Exabyte has introduced SmartClean technology with its upcoming Mammoth-2 tape drive, in a move to reduce media costs and lifespan for tape users.

The cleaning technology will also be featured in the company's SmartClean Advanced Metal Evaporated (AME) cartridges, to remove the need for manual intervention in routine tape path cleaning and increase the format's self-sufficiency.

The drive monitors the error rate of data for each read/write head and activates cleaning when it detects debris.

Exabyte also intends the new technology to cut down time, as backup failures due to dirty heads are reduced and organisations should not have to spend as much time servicing drives.

AME tapes are available in 75m, 150m and 225m, and have native capacities of 20GB, 40GB and 60GB respectively.