While the Mammoth tape drive could support up to 170m length tapes and thereby supporting up to 40 GB (compressed memory), the Mammoth-2 (M2) tape drives can support up to 225m length tapes and 60 GB native capacities. The Exabyte 00558 is for use with M2 drives and also has a native capacity of 60 GB, however, through the improvement in compression (software and hardware), the compressed capacity has gone up to 150 GB. Transfer rates are also higher for the M2 at 12 MB/s as compared to 3 MB/s of Mammoth drives. Just like with Mammoth drives, the media used is not Metal Particle as used with 8mm tape media but AME (Advanced Metal Evaporated).

And now for some Sony 225m tapes…