Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 08:24:41 -0500 From: "Mike Avery" <mavery@mail.otherwhen.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Recomended tapes form HP? Message-ID: <199907141328.IAA25886@hostigos.otherwhen.com> In-Reply-To: <19990714160513.28515@mojave.lemis.com> References: <199907132304.SAA25026@hostigos.otherwhen.com>; from Mike Avery on Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 06:00:32PM -0500
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On 14 Jul 99, at 16:05, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Tuesday, 13 July 1999 at 18:00:32 -0500, Mike Avery wrote: > > On 14 Jul 99, at 1:16, Iani Brankov wrote: > >> What about the these models: > >> HP Colorado Travan drives (IDE) > >> HP SureStore Travan drives (SCSI) > >> I read in the handbook that QIC drives are more reliable than DAT ones. > >> According to HP these models are QIC compatible. > > Ahhh... which handbook? > Normally I'd expect him to mean the online handbook. What makes you > think differently? > > We just had a long discussion here and a number of people (not just me) > > said... loudly... that Travan and QIC are evil. > Funny, that's not what I recall. Who said QIC was evil? The only > problem with QIC is the relatively low storage capacity of the > affordable ones. And the opinions were split about Travan. QIC and Travan are essentially the same technology. And until the "NS" series of Travan drives no one claimed that they were professional quality drives. The results I've seen with the NS series drives doesn't make me want to use 'em. As I mentioned last time around, the Seagate tech support staff hinted strongly that travan should not be used in critical applications, and that critical kinda meant, "if you want to recover your data". > > I would suggest skipping both of 'em. > > Look at DAT drives instead. > Now they *did* agree that DDS (which you call DAT) is evil. Well, there was some discussion there also. But whether they should be called DAT or DDS seems to vary from vendor to vendor. DAT is the physical form factor of the cartridge. Archive and Seagate call their drives DAT drives. HP calls them DDSx, where X indicates the level of the DDS format. Archive and Seagate tell you which level DDS media to use. All in all.... I think picking on that point is rather fruitless. > They are some of the most unreliable drives on the market. I have > yet to have one last two years, and I currently have replaced a > drive with another of identical make, and I can't read my old > backups. Odd. I have a 7 year old DAT (or DDS1) HP drive that's still going fine. I did have lots of troubles with HP DDS2 drives (if memory serves). After six months to a year, they needed to be overhauled. If they were in warranty, HP did it for us. However, since then, customers and friends have been very happy with the Seagate Scorpion DAT (DDS3, or 12/24 gig) drives. Fast and reliable. HP has played some games wherein they changed the compression algorityms and made earlier tapes unreadable. A real problem for people who need to recover data from older tapes. And Sony seems to use different formatting on it's DDS2 tapes than other people, so it's a BAD idea to use Sony tapes with HP drives. We'd be able to verify the backup and not recover data a week later. Worse, Sony tapes were easier to get than the other guys. As a side note, a number of years back Scientific American ran an article on the life expectancy of backups. Their conclusion was that most backups were rendered useless by the march of technology sooner than the media showed problems. How much do you have on 8" floppy disks? How much of it can you restore? How about those 5" CPM diskettes? Can you recover that really cool code you wrote years back? Or even the tax information you created with a Lotus 1- 2-3 tax spreadsheet you found on a BBS? If you DO read the data, is it still useable in current spreadsheets? How about diskettes from your Lanier word processor? (They used to be popular...) Aside from that, they put the data life expectancy of DDS tapes at 18 months to 2 years (if memory serves). I was shocked, since we'd just converted from 8mm (which has a somewhat longer life expectancy). In the end, I called 3M. Their comment was that the report was correct, but incomplete. If you store DDS tapes lying flat, their life expectancy is short. If you stack them on edge, they are supposed to be good for 10 years. Of course, that leaves many people with the problem that the current version of the backup software may not be able to read tapes from the older version. (An area where *nix shines.... I hope. Some commercial firms seem to have no qualms about changing format and not making them backwards compatible.) > I wish I could recommend a good tape drive, but the only ones which > look like being good are DLT, and they cost an arm and a leg. I've had great results with the Seagate Scorpion. Which, interestingly enough, Seagate calls a DAT drive. They do mention it uses DDS3 media. I've seen internal drives from about $900 USA. If you can live with re-furbished drives, and older DLT drives are OK, you can also check out http://www.corpsys.com/store/products.asp?dept=Tape%20Drives They have an archive 4mm DAT (DDS2) changer for $495 US, and older DLT drives in 10/20 gig or 15/30 gig flavors for $695 US each. I've had good luck with the vendor in the past, and they offer an extended (6 year) warranty on refurbished merchandise. Of course, the real pain in DLT is the media costs.... Mike ====================================================================== Mike Avery MAvery@mail.otherwhen.com (409)-842-2942 (work) ICQ: 16241692 * Spam is for lusers who can't get business any other way * A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: One thing about pain....it proves you're alive. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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