Advanced Intelligent Tape

AIT, or Advanced Intelligent Tape, is a high-speed, high-capacity magnetic tape data storage format developed by Sony to compete with the DLT, LTO, DAT/DDS, and VXA formats. AIT uses a dual-reel cassette similar to 8mm Video8 or Exabyte formats.

Super AIT (SAIT) is a higher capacity variant using wider tape (1/2”) in a larger, single-spool cartridge, similar to DLT and LTO. Both AIT and SAIT use the helical scan method of reading and writing to the tape.

SAIT-1: Highest capacity tape cartridge from 2003 to 2006. 500GB native and 30MB per second sustained transfer rate. Displaced by DLT-S4 (800GB).

SAIT-2: Released in 2006, 800GB native and 45MB per second sustained transfer rate.

Many generations of this format are both backwards and forwards compatible, allowing multiple generations of tape drives to both read and write to multiple generations of tape media except as follows:

AIT-4: Not compatible with previous generations
AIT-5: Backwards compatible with AIT-3, AIT-3Ex, AIT-4

Please note: Data Capacity and Speed figures above are for uncompressed data.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html . It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Intelligent_Tape.

AIT tape specifications (click on image to magnify).

SAIT tape specifications (click on image to magnify).