Faster and more reliable DDS backup mechanisms for the e3000 are on their way, according to the storage products manager for the platform. Justin Jones of HP’s Commercial Systems Division said the group will be supporting DDS-4 tape backup systems for MPE/iX in the second half of this year. An HP DDS-4 external drive costs about $1,400, has a 40Gb capacity and its peak burst transfer rate is 10 Gb per hour. In contrast, HP’s external DLT-4000 drive costs $2,100, with the same capacity and transfer rate. There’s a savings in media, too: DDS-4 tapes cost $25 each, while DLT IV data cartridges cost $65 each. But DLT doesn’t use the problematic helical scan technology of DDS, although DDS-4 is said to improve alignment problems from DDS-3 and earlier backup units. The DDS-4 HP SureStore DAT40e drives will be one of the first external peripherals to make full use of the bandwidth of the LVD Ultra2 SCSI interfaces, new to the e3000 on the latest A-Class and N-Class systems.