[rescue] Tape drive woes

[Phil Stracchino]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 01:53:52PM -0700, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> You don't want to do 120 GB to either of those, it would drive you mad.

Yeah, I figured.

> IMHO, neither format is reliable enough to depend on differentials unless
> you do frequent level 0 backups.
> 
> > DLT, right, that's the other format I was trying to think of
> > and totally
> > blanking on.  About how much did you pay for them, and what's the
> > capacity of a DLT3?
> 
> DLT-IIIxt hold 15 GB straight, nominally 30 GB compressed.
> 
> That's _not_ the latest format, though.  More recent stuff holds much more,
> and the newer-format tapes seem to be cheaper, too.

Yeah, I understand VXA-3 is ready to hit the market (the latest revision
of the VXA-1 firmware contains tweaks to stop VXA-1 drives from seeing
VXA-3 tapes as blank VXA-1 media), which oughta be in the 160GB range
uncompressed, and I understand HP Ultrium does 100GB uncompressed.  IIRC,
AIT-4 is supposed to be 200GB uncompressed, but I don't know if that's
on schedule.

I suspect that when some of the new nanoscale memory technologies that
are in the works now hit the market, tape is going to die.  Things like
NRAM, for instance, or some of the holographic storage technologies that
are promising up to 1TB capacities.


> DLT tapes are not cheap, but they seem to last a long time.  With the amount
> of data you're talking about, though, you probably need one of the later DLT
> formats; at $30 each, the 4 DLT-IIxt tapes to store a 120 GB level 0 dump
> are going to cost you more than the drive.  Later DLT formats hold up to 80
> GB (compressed) per tape, and the tapes cost the same....

Thanks for the tips.


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