[lopsa-discuss] tape drive recommendations

[Bruce A. Hamilton]

At 10:58 PM 12/8/2005, Scott Francis wrote:
>... 35GB of data... to back up daily, ... 2x their current needs 
>should last them at least five years).
>
>...small business client with limited funds, ...
>... between 50 and 100GB of data
>(uncompressed) ... I 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.

It sounds like you're pretty much limited to DAT72, based on your 
budget. I'd be interested in hearing what sort of compression folks 
get with that. On my DDS4 drive (the generation previous to DAT72) at 
home I only get 25 GB per 20 GB (uncompressed) tape (Windows XP, 
typical mix of email and whatnot).

At the enterprise level, I would avoid LTO1 like the plague. On a 
dual STK L700 library with 18 IBM LTO1 drives and over 1000 tapes, we 
consistently saw media errors on approx. 1% of all jobs. Both drives 
and media had problems. We tried half a dozen different media brands 
with no major difference. I also had a small L20 library with dual 
Seagate LTO1 drives, which experienced similar problems. Perhaps LTO1 
is more sensitive to environmental issues, because our data center is 
dustier than I would like.

Everything has been wonderful since we converted to LTO2 about eight 
months ago. We ran many of the LTO2 drives with LTO1 media for quite 
a few months and saw slight improvements in throughput and error 
rates, but only with LTO2 media do we get consistently clean backups.

--Bruce (Bruce Hamilton, Redondo Beach, CA)
bhami at pobox.com
http://bhami.com/