Mammoth drive

Mammoth, developed by Exabyte, is one of the 8 mm technologies for tape drives. This drive technology works without a pressure roller; the servo motor must always adapt its speed to the current winding situation and the tape tension.

Mammoth uses the helical-scanrecording method and offers a storage capacity of 20 GB and, in the Mammoth-2 (M2) version, 60 GB. Mammoth drives have access times of about 55 s and a relatively high data transfer rate of 6 MB/s, respectively 12 MB/s for M2.

Mammoth tape libraries, found in the Unix and NT environments, allow data storage from 140 GB to 3.2 TB. Storage space can be increased by a factor of 2.5 using Advanced Lossless Data Compression( ALDC).