The drive has the same loading mechanism as in the ADR2 60ide drive. Remember not to force the cartridge in, once you start to feel some resistance while inserting the cartridge, simply press on the open/close button and it'll take the cartridge in. Once the cartridge is in, you'll hear the cartridge rewind & fast forward. This is normal and nothing to be alarmed about.
If you're new to tape drives you should be aware of how they access data. Tape drives are unable to access data randomly as it does with hard drives. Tape drives are only able to access data sequentially, making them considerably slower to normal drives, and furthermore tape drives have to constantly rewind and fast forward the tape to find the appropriate position to write data. ( it's exactly like the operation of a conventional VHS cassette).
Nevertheless the ADR2 60USB tape drive is supposed to have a native data transfer rate of around 2.5MB/sec which goes up to 5MB/sec with software compression. (performance analysis will be done next) Even though tape drives are slower can conventional hard drives, they provide far better reliability. As in ADR2 60USB it has a bit error rate of 1 in 10 to the power 19. This is far superior to a PC's hard drive without doubt.
Another feature to be aware of is that, when the ADR2 60USB drive is in idle for more than 5 minutes, you'll notice the drive bay of the tape drive opening slightly. When asked from Onstream, the reason they gave is as follows;
"the cartridge door is slightly opened after a few minutes of no use with a cartridge loaded in the mechanism. The drive's firmware puts the mechanism in a "pause" position in case of no use. The reason for that is to avoid the drive roller being constantly in contact and the magnetic media is constantly tighten around the head. These measures are taken as a further improvement of the system. The ADR2.60ide behaves in the same way, due to the fact that the movement is not sensor controlled a slight difference in movement can be observed between the drives."
The ADR2 60USB has been designed to also support the new USB 2.0 standard for even faster transfer rates. Onstream does not provide the data cartridge with the purchase of the ADR2 60USB drive, and it has to be purchased separately. The 60GB cartridges are priced at around US$70 which works out to be US$1.17 = 1GB. (The 60GB capacity is obtained assuming a 2:1 compression ratio). The cheapest price I found for the cartridge was US$62 or US$175 for a pack of three, which is without doubt one of the cheapest storage mediums, and it's certainly nice to see Onstream keeping the price of these cartridges very reasonable.
