HP and Sony have announced plans to boost the performance and capacity of Digital Audio Tape drives with the introduction of the DAT 320 format.

The firms are jointly developing the Digital Data Storage (DDS) standard, but will separately offer their own DAT 320 tape drives and cartridges.

With backup speeds of up to 86GB per hour with 2:1 data compression, the DAT 320 open standard will offer up to 320GB of capacity on a single cartridge, compared with 160GB from the current DAT 160 format.

The DAT 320 will also consume fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations, and will be backwards compatible with the DAT 160.

Analysts at IDC forecast that the tape market will generate more than $1.4bn in 2009 since tape provides small firms with a cost-effective storage solution to handle the huge increases in digital data.

"Tape customers are concerned about outgrowing their existing drives and do not want to switch away from a cost-effective and trusted technology like DAT/DDS," said Robert Amatruda, research director for tape and removable storage at IDC.

"The use of tape storage to support backup and archiving is very popular and the doubled capacity with the DAT 320 will be an ideal choice for small to midsize businesses with limited space for extra hardware."

HP and Sony will offer the same base hardware for the DAT 320, but will develop features within the firmware configuration to sell the DAT 320 tape drives and media through their own branded and OEM business channels.