Information Technology professionals depend on DAT for its superior combination of reliability, compatibility, performance and affordability. DAT has certainly marked its territory with a vast installed base. Final specs for DDS-3 were established in 1995. No one likes to change technologies or standards when a lot of time and money have been invested. Now that DDS-3 is on the scene, the issue is resolved.
Interchangeability is also a key purchase consideration.
It's comforting to know you're storing your data in a format that is so widely used. When corporations merge, for example, it's a good bet that both will be using DAT to back up their data, ensuring an easy transition. Overwrite and distortion performance is also greatly improved due to a dual-coating in the media that provides an extremely thin magnetic layer. Instead of shrinking the head gap to minimize this interference, the read-back channel characteristics are changed to compensate for it. The signal from the head is determined by pairs of bit cells, instead of single-bit cells.