While others are getting out of the tape storage business, Hewlett Packard is coming in with its USB tape drives for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

These are the HP Storageworks DAT 72 USB and DAT 40 USB. The digital audio tape (DAT) drives use the universal storage bus 2.0 interface, making storage essentially plug-and-save.

With HP’s One_button Disaster recovery feature, the tape drives let users recover data, and in the event of a disaster, their complete system configuration with the push of a single button.

The DAT 72 USB has a capacity of 72GB on a single data cartridge and a transfer rate of 23GB/hr, assuming a 2:1 data compression rate. The DAT 40 USB is a DDS-4 tape drive that stores 40GB of compressed data on a single cartridge at a rate of 23GB/hr. also assuming 2:1 data compression rate.

Both drives are expected to ship only in July. For the Singapore market, the price for an external version of the DAT 72 USB is S$1,799 while an internal version is S$1,599, excluding GST. The price is the US for the DAT 40 USB starts from US$599.