Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1998 12:07:58 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: rick hamell <hamellr@dsinw.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SCSI Tape Drive Recommendations? Message-ID: <19981224120758.B12346@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.981222210109.2405D-100000@dsinw.com>; from rick hamell on Tue, Dec 22, 1998 at 09:06:25PM -0800 References: <19981223143817.Y85005@freebie.lemis.com> <Pine.BSF.3.91.981222210109.2405D-100000@dsinw.com>
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On Tuesday, 22 December 1998 at 21:06:25 -0800, rick hamell wrote: > >> The silence is deafening, isn't it? The question is ``reliable''. I >> find most tape units unreliable. At the moment I'm still using DDS >> drives, but I haven't had any that have survived more than two years, >> and refurbishing seems to be a waste of money. General consensus is >> that Travan drives are even worse than DDS or Exabyte, but that may be >> prejudice. > > From what I've seen, half the problems with tape drives has been > dust on the optics. An HP tech support person has suggested to me a > weekly cleaning with an approved HP cleaning tape, something most people > don't seem to do. :) They tend to more nowadays since drives start flashing LEDs if you don't. I've done so religiously on all except my first DDS drive, and they still fail on me. > For the price of some of the high-end Exobyte tapes, I'd probally build > a second machine to backup too. Even if you're low on money, a 2nd hard > drive will still be a good investment. They're still *very* expensive compared to disks. The cheapest DDS drives cost about $500. For that you can buy a couple of 8 GB disk drives, and that might be a better way to do backups :-) Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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