International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / As the performance of inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) data storage devices continues to increase, the temptation to use them as the basis for data capture products for military and industrial applications becomes ever more compelling. For example, the Digital Linear Tape (DLT) format now offers a 270 Gigabits per cassette capacity at a sustained transfer rate of 40 Mbits/s – performance which would have cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per system just a few years ago. But to transplant such a device from its benign office habitat into a data capture product which will function reliably and consistently in a wide range of field and platform environments is an engineering task fully as difficult and complex as designing an environmentally robust recorder from scratch. This paper discusses the problems which typically have to be overcome; environmental protection, reliability, data integrity, power supplies, software issues, control and data interfacing, etc., citing practical examples of analog and digital DLT-based data recorders which are now entering service for telemetry, intelligence gathering, anti-submarine warfare and related applications