OT: SLR 5 Tape drive vs DAT

[Bill Vermillion]

On Wed, Feb 02 10:51 , while denying his reply is spam, Kenneth Brody 
prattled on endlessly saying: 

> Quoting Scott Walker <scottw1 at alltel.net>:
> 
> > One of my customers has an old QIC tape drive that has finally died.
> >
> > I told him to get a quote on a DAT drive to replace it.
> [...]

> Nowadays, is there any inherent advantage of using tapes when
> DVD writers and media are getting so inexpensive?

One site I mother-hen usually backs up about 30GB on a RedHat
system nightly.  Using the Ecrix VXA tape drives I'm running about
100MB/min on backups.

The ONLY times it's failed to backup have required a restart
of Linux as the drive is an IDE in the SCSI emulation mode
and you just set that in the lilo or grub configuration.

Two times it has been restarted in 18 months for that problem.
The other restarts have been when the power failure outlasted
the UPS - and I went through two for day outages when we
had 3 'canes come right through Orlando in about 6 weeks.

Maybe when the Blu-Ray DVDs get on the market with their close
to 50GB capactiy it will be time to look at that.  Sony has
shown in the lab with multiple layers they can appoach
500GB on those.

Rotating media access is always fast because you can have Scotty
set the heads into warp drive and span millions of byties laterally
instead of radially.  That's a problem with DVD -/+ media in that 
it's not really formatted like drives - but DVD-RAM is - which was
designed for that type of work.

If you need more than a bit over 4GB there are dual-layer burners
but the media is about $10 disk as opposed to $0.40 per disk.
And the second layer burning is far slower than the top layer.

I have only one ex-SCO site that backs up less than 4GB.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com