Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 07:20:25 +0100 From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SCSI Tape Drives... Message-ID: <19990203072025.42457@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199902011305.FAA08479@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>; from Don Lewis on Mon, Feb 01, 1999 at 05:05:11AM -0800 References: <mjacob@feral.com> <199902011305.FAA08479@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>
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As Don Lewis wrote: > Our old Exabytes didn't last all that long, either, as I recall. Neither did ours, btw. Most of them fell into the habit of never wanting to give you your tape back some day. > When used for daily backups, my experience is that QIC-150 drives > don't last too long, and that's backup up a lot less data that I > have been archiving with DAT. Hmm, what kind of QIC-150 drives? The old Wangteks are built very cheaply. OTOH, i didn't have any bad experience (so far) with Tandberg QIC drives, and there are some three drives (TDC 4222, 2.5 GB + compression) around me doing nightly backups for years now. QIC media have a good lifetime (unlike DAT), and it's not a problem to use the very same tape every night for a year or more. (Two of the three drives are used in an operatorless environment where it's simply impossible to change the medium on something like a daily or weekly basis. So far, in one of those machines, the backup has already saved our butt for two dead disks.) > I've also had problems with media > interchange between QIC drives. Sounds like you've got a broken or worn-out drive. I've never experienced this, and my drive can still read any QIC cartridge around, with some of them being almost ten years old now. > We're switching over to DLT for backups here at work, but the drive > and media are really too pricey for home use, and I don't need that > much capacity. Just to clarify: i think about the same, and we also use DLT at work. > + Media cost > > I'd guess that 8mm and DAT come in first and second here. Hmm, not if you consider the short lifetime of a DAT cassette. OTOH, i've got a pile of QIC-150 cartridges on a shelf stemming from software vendors like you mentioned, so they are for free, and they still serve well enough for small quantities of data. The TDC 4222 is probably about 5 years old now, and so far i haven't needed more than 10 of the higher-density (and more expensive) cartridges. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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