30GB and 50GB Removables

After yesterdays bit on the 10 gig removables, Chad Pommiss wrote in to tell us about "A Philip Electronics offshoot named OnStream that has developed 30GB and 50GB removable drives, based on "Advanced Digital Recording", boasting variable data rates of 1 or 2MB/second (3GB/hour). Parallel, SCSI and IDE/ATAPI versions are available from $299" Ok now that is what I wanna keep my MP3s on.

Comments

Question...

[Anonymous Shepherd]

What a waste of alignment points... Oh well.

This, as been aptly pointed out by many in the forum, is a tape drive, with uncompressed storage close to 15GB or 25GB on a variable speed media. Evidently it also has data write speeds up to 2mb/s, and currently supports only Windows solutions with Linux support soon, and other OSes such as Mac at a later date...

Why are they targetting the Windows market? Are there that many Windows systems that need tape backup that it makes more sense to do Windows first and Linux/Unix second? I thought servers with high data requirements were still predominantly Unix boxes, though perhaps they aren't targetting servers. Who is their target market then?

Maybe some clued in Windows sysadmin will be able to tell me differently, or someone will know of a use that begs for this solution in the large Windows desktop market, or perhaps the workstation market?

AS