On Monday 02 April 2007, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
a little off-topic but I'm looking into replacing our old DDS4 tape drive which is now too small. Our choice now looks like LTO, AIT or DLT as our total backup size is now 80Gb. Has anyone got any good/bad experiences with any of these technologies? I'm assuming that all will be recognised by SuSE on our servier which has both SATA and SCSI. What's the cheapest to buy and run?
We currently use LTO. It works ok - for a tape. As all tapes it is slow as hell for recovery case, a LTO media is mechanically robust but can't be used that often (we change media after 15 backup cycles and already had rejected tapes).
We have three LTO drives; life cycle of a tape is MUCH MUCH longer than that.
Next time we need to change backup system we will go to USB/eSATA disks - one disk for each tape media we currently have in use: Pro: - you don't need an expensive tape-drive - you can already have 1TB per media
You can get 1TB drives?
Yes. Seagate has announced them
- you can reuse such a disk much more often then 15 times
Not likely if you are trundling them back and forth between an offsite backup location. The durability of a caddied drive isn't event remotely close to that of a magnetic tape. Not even close.
Your entire (and repetitive) assertion that disks can't outlast tape is based on this "trundling them back and forth" nonsense. Tapes wear out just doing their job. They wear out sitting on the shelf. Disks don't need to be "trundled". Not with today's bandwidth. The entire backup can be off site, across the street, or across town. As for your assertion about disk backup being fried by one jolt of static, that's the most absurd thing I've heard in months. Computers bearing disks get static jolts every day. Some in Northern cold dry climates get 6 or 8 strong jolts every working day for years. No problem. Its odd you would take this line of reasoning. After all, tapes have been used for backup and regularly replaced for years, backing up the SAME HARD DRIVES year after year after year, often for a decade or more of using the same disk drive. Most installations burn thru dozens of tapes, either thru attrition or prudent replacement, while continuing to back up the same drives. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org