[rescue] Backups

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 @ 15:23 -0400, Nadine said:

> An intial reskim of some of the info I looked at before indicated that
> the table at the beginning of the tape is the major spot for wear
> in all linear tapes, and suggests that the "1 million passes" is in
> reality much (like <250K) actual "uses".  Of course, you also have to
> look at the load/unload cycle life.

I thought that information was only read and written once per tape
insertion?

I never had a tape's index sectors go bad, but lost plenty where the
data was.

I kind of miss tapes that were positional.  There was just something
neat about a tape being used for more than just backup.

I'm not that old, but was using 9-track tapes at my first "real computer
job" in 1989.

> I've never seen an LTO or DLT that was not wide SCSI, or Diff/Wide
> SCSI.  I meant from the standpoint of streaming data to them.  I'd
> seriously doubt the ability of an x86 box with IDE drives to be able
> to provide the sustained output to necessary to keep a local SCSI DLT
> streaming--but I'm guessing.  Maybe SATA RAID-5?

That's going to depend a lot on the system in question.  

Plenty of SCSI systems won't be able to keep up with a fast tape drive
either.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The object of war is not to die for your
country but to make the other bastard die for his." -- General George S.
Patton]