Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 05:05:11 -0800 From: Don Lewis <Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com> To: mjacob@feral.com, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl> Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SCSI Tape Drives... Message-ID: <199902011305.FAA08479@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com> In-Reply-To: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> "Re: SCSI Tape Drives..." (Jan 31, 9:29am)
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I'm also in the market for a backup solution for home. I haven't had very good experiences with anything here at work. On Jan 31, 9:29am, Matthew Jacob wrote: } Subject: Re: SCSI Tape Drives... } All these units support reasonable commands, but there are other } criteria to consider: } } + Likelihood (or not) of tapes jamming/breaking (I'm a bit } prejudiced against DAT for this) I've never had a *that* problem with DAT. We used to see it on our old Exabyte 8200's. I've managed to kill off a number of DAT drives running Amanda here at work. When doing 500 MB to 1GB backups five nights a week, the HP DAT drives that we're using only seem to last about a year before starting to get massive write errors. The last drive lasted nearly two years, possibly because I fed it the cleaning tape once a week instead of every other week. I also killed off an old WangDAT drive this same way before switching to HP. Some of the other DAT drives around here get even more use and fail after only a few months. I don't have any experience with the Sony or Seagate DAT drives. Our old Exabytes didn't last all that long, either, as I recall. } + Media Interchange with other systems (I almost never see large } QIC drives. 8mm is probably the leading interchange for s } lot of systems) When used for daily backups, my experience is that QIC-150 drives don't last too long, and that's backup up a lot less data that I have been archiving with DAT. I've also had problems with media interchange between QIC drives. Some of our software vendors used to ship QIC media, it was not uncommon that the tapes were unreadable in some of our drives. We don't have any high density QIC drives here. } + Speed and Capacity per media piece. DLT wins here, with more } specialized tapes (e.g. AIM or STK DS3) at the higher end. We're switching over to DLT for backups here at work, but the drive and media are really too pricey for home use, and I don't need that much capacity. + Media cost I'd guess that 8mm and DAT come in first and second here. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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