Dell's PowerVault 110T is an Ultrium 3 drive that packs up to 400GB of native, or 800GB of compressed, data on a single compact cartridge that costs around £50. This equates to about 12.5p or 6.25p per gigabyte, far less than any disk-based storage equivalent.

The external version of the PowerVault 110T is about the size of a shoebox. But a large integral fan and power supply together with its solid metal casing make it considerably heavier at 3kg – just about portable enough for backing up multiple machines at different locations.

The unit we reviewed came with an Adaptec 39160 dual-channel 64bit SCSI card as well as a three-metre LVD SCSI cable and terminator. A couple of Ultrium 3 data cartridges are supplied as standard along with a copy of Symantec's Backup Exec software.
The drive is noisy during operation, with a single green LED that indicates that data transfer is in progress. Native data transfer rates are about 80MB/s or 135MB/s with data compression.

We tested the drive using a Pentium III server with a 32bit PCI bus. The PowerVault 110T copied the contents of the hard disk, 24.5GB of data, in one hour and 25 minutes, and copied a single 6.35GB directory of multimedia files in 15 minutes and 16 seconds. All tests were conducted using Win2000 Server's integrated Backup utility with compression and verification turned off.