Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 16:24:59 -0600 From: Jon Hamilton <hamilton@pobox.com> To: Gary Kline <kline@tera.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 4mm tape drive question Message-ID: <199812192223.OAA25905@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 19 Dec 1998 12:12:05 PST." <199812192012.MAA23074@athena.tera.com>
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In message <199812192012.MAA23074@athena.tera.com>, Gary Kline wrote: } According to Jon Hamilton: } > } > } > Gary Kline writes: [ ... ] } Way back in the Middle Ages of 1995, they } prob'ly had no idea of hardware compression; } and at any rate, this drive doesn't have it. Oh no, tape drives were doing hardware compression well before 1995. It sounds like you've got a pretty low end (for the time) unit, though, and it may very well not have such a feature. } > } I need to buy a second tape drive (4mm or 8mm) for sage and } > } tar | dd across my net. ...The good news, of course, is that } > } I'm never (?!) going to have 11G of data to backup. } > } > You'd have to be a slow learner to believe that :) You said yourself } > that just 4 years ago, 2G was "a _lot_" of storage, and you've since } > bought a 9G drive. I'm confident that your storage needs will continue } > to increase, possibly even at an increased rate. With the continued } > improvement of processing power, data sets are getting larger, and so } > are applications. That trend is unlikely to reverse (or even to slow } > appreciably). } } Unfortunately! } } In '91 I coughed up a bazillion dollars for a 1.08G } drive for my SVR4 system. Was certain that it would } be (at least) decades before I'd ever be crunched, but } within a few years I was running with filesystem slices } at 90-95%. The good news is that the cost to upgrade has continued to fall too. You can get a complete system (with monitor, printer, and even a frill or two) for under US$1000 these days; I remember having paid twice that for a 105Mb disk drive some years back :) If performance keeps doubling every few years while total cost for a "cutting edge minus a little" system continues to fall, I won't be too upset. -- Jon Hamilton hamilton@pobox.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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