Date: Tue, 2 Apr 96 10:15:39 MET DST From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de Cc: john@starfire.mn.org, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: looking for large-capacity tape recommendations, discommendations, comments Message-ID: <199604020947.LAA16908@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> In-Reply-To: <199604011708.TAA05168@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de>; from "Christoph P. Kukulies" at Apr 1, 96 7:08 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>> Please reply directly, as I do not subscribe to this list. >> >> I am looking for recommendations and user experience with large- >> capacity (14Gb+) 4mm tape drives. These are fairly costly items, > > I can only speak for 2-8GB 4mm DAT drives and unless you are only > using them for occasional backup I would not recommend DAT. > > Here at a site we are running a nightly full backup of a > NT server (under NT) and it turned out that after a couple of weeks that > the head of the drive got worn out and older tapes could not be read > with same drive any more. We had to buy a new drive to get to our > older backups :-( The head wore out after a couple of weeks? How long was the guarantee on the drive? HP has a 5 year guarantee, and so far I've had to use it several times. Apart from that, however: both DDS (so-called DAT) drives and Exabytes require frequent head cleaning. If you don't clean the heads, you'll see the problems Christoph describes. If you do clean them, you might still see the problems. I've been following up a problem with Exabytes here at SNI, and came to the discovery that Exabyte does not recommend *any* cleaning cartridge except its own :-) The claim is that the others (and some of the older Exabyte cleaning cartridges, for that matter) can do more harm than good. I haven't heard anything similar about DDS drives, but it's the same technology. I sent a message out recently asking for other bad experiences with HP drives. If anybody has some, please contact me. Greg
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199604020947.LAA16908>