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Date:      Tue, 2 Apr 2002 21:26:20 -0500 (EST)
From:      Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>
To:        paulbeard@mac.com
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: SCSI tape drive recommendations? 
Message-ID:  <200204030226.g332QKE74784@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <3CAA3639.2030401@mac.com>

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In article <3CAA3639.2030401@mac.com> you write:

>looking to do it right this time. Any either recommended units or 
>brands and formats?

We are quite pleased with the Sony SDT-10000.  We have about ten of
them; they are quite speedy, and have a much higher capacity than we
actually need at the moment.  (This is actually a good thing: the
speed that the tape can be pulled through the transport is limited, so
a higher-capacity drive will invariably have a higher recording
density and therefore will write the same amount of data faster.)
Downside: they're rather expensive (about $1500-2000) and if they
break you have to ship the unit back to Sony.  This is a DDS-4 unit;
Sony still makes DDS-3 units for about half the price.  We also have
the DDS-4 autoloader (SDT-21000?), which has a cartridge that holds
eight tapes; we use it for most of our daily backups.  The autoloader
is only a few hundred more than the bare transport.

Speed considerations are moot unless you are set up to spool your
dumps to disk before writing the tape (or your files are very large).
You can't pull metadata out of the filesystem fast enough to stream
any decent modern tape format.

-GAWollman

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman   |
wollman@lcs.mit.edu  |            History starts with a consonant.
Opinions not those of|
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA|

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