[lopsa-discuss] tape drive recommendations

[Scott Francis]

I find myself in the market for a tape drive (for a client), and it's
been quite a while since I've been in the position of having to choose
the drive, rather than having to make the data fit something that's
already been chosen. :) The client has about 35GB of data
(applications and user fileshare storage) to back up daily, and I'd
like to give them plenty of room to grow (at their current rate of
growth, 2x their current needs should last them at least five years).

What are the pros and cons of the various (mostly SCSI-connected)
drive formats out there? I've most recently been using 36/72GB DAT,
but it wasn't long ago that I was looking at a large (300TB)
LTO3-based tape robot library. Obviously that's overkill here, but I'm
also seeing AIT and SDLT formats with models in my price and capacity
range.

This is a small business client with limited funds, so high
performance and capacity aren't really requirements - I'd like to find
them something that will backup between 50 and 100GB of data
(uncompressed) with cartridges that don't cost an arm and a leg. I'm
probably going to be doing the backups with dump or tar on OpenBSD
(although I may be stuck getting a second drive to backup certain data
that I can't migrate away from Windows 2003). From a little browsing
over on pricewatch.com, it looks like I could expect to spend
$500-$600 on a suitable drive, but I'd like to keep the cost of
cartridges down under $20 each if I can.

thanks folks.
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