DAT provide very high data density per inch of tape. It uses a tape ribbon of 4mm width enclosed in a cartridge. Tape length is either 60 meters or 90 meters. For very high data recording density, its tape drive uses helical scan technique for data recording.
DAT drives use a data-recording format called Digital Data Storage (DDS), which provides three levels of error correcting code to ensure excellent data integrity. Storage capacity of DAT cartridges varies from 4 GB to 14 GB, and data transfer speed of DAT drives is about 366 KB/sec.