From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Apr 2 18:26:29 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu (khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu [18.24.4.193]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 959B937B417 for ; Tue, 2 Apr 2002 18:26:24 -0800 (PST) Received: (from wollman@localhost) by khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.4/8.11.6) id g332QKE74784; Tue, 2 Apr 2002 21:26:20 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from wollman) Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 21:26:20 -0500 (EST) From: Garrett Wollman Message-Id: <200204030226.g332QKE74784@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> To: paulbeard@mac.com Subject: Re: SCSI tape drive recommendations? X-Newsgroups: mit.lcs.mail.freebsd-stable In-Reply-To: <3CAA3639.2030401@mac.com> Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Cc: stable@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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| To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message