A new search facility said to enhance the performance of the EXB-8200 8mm Cartridge Tape Subsystem has been announced by Exabyte Corp: searching over half of a 2.5Gb tape with an average access time of 85 seconds, the EXB-8200 now achieves search speeds of 15Mb per second; to achieve the high-speed search functionality, two search commands, Showblock and Findblock, were added to the EXB-8200, and these commands enable the product to position to a given point of tape very quickly; abbreviated filemarks may be used to delimit groups of recorded user data, taking up 23 tracks each or about 184Kb of data space; initial shipments are scheduled for next month, and OEM pricing on the tape subsystem is $1,665; EXB-8200 upgrades will be available in June.
