Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 19:34:38 +0100 (CET) From: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SCSI Tape Drives... Message-ID: <199902031834.TAA00711@yedi.iaf.nl> In-Reply-To: <19990203072025.42457@uriah.heep.sax.de> from J Wunsch at "Feb 3, 99 07:20:25 am"
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As J Wunsch wrote... > As Don Lewis wrote: > > > Our old Exabytes didn't last all that long, either, as I recall. > > Neither did ours, btw. Most of them fell into the habit of never > wanting to give you your tape back some day. Exabytes (primarily the earlier ones) are consumer-electronics based cr* > > When used for daily backups, my experience is that QIC-150 drives > > don't last too long, and that's backup up a lot less data that I > > have been archiving with DAT. > > Hmm, what kind of QIC-150 drives? The old Wangteks are built very > cheaply. OTOH, i didn't have any bad experience (so far) with > Tandberg QIC drives, and there are some three drives (TDC 4222, 2.5 GB > + compression) around me doing nightly backups for years now. QIC Tandberg are really good drives. I used the 525 Mb variant succesfully and now I also own a 4200. Don't use it often, I like my DLT for doing the regular backups. Archive drives are also reasonable, but not as good as Tandberg. Archive is a bit like Exabyte: use the firmware of the day. > media have a good lifetime (unlike DAT), and it's not a problem to use > the very same tape every night for a year or more. (Two of the three > drives are used in an operatorless environment where it's simply > impossible to change the medium on something like a daily or weekly > basis. So far, in one of those machines, the backup has already saved > our butt for two dead disks.) Hmmm. You better do a couple of retension wind/rewinds every now and then. Really helps to keep QIC cartridges happy. > > I've also had problems with media > > interchange between QIC drives. > > Sounds like you've got a broken or worn-out drive. I've never > experienced this, and my drive can still read any QIC cartridge > around, with some of them being almost ten years old now. Same here. Dirty head maybe? If the head develops a 'canyon' it is time to say goodbye to the drive. > > We're switching over to DLT for backups here at work, but the drive > > and media are really too pricey for home use, and I don't need that > > much capacity. > > Just to clarify: i think about the same, and we also use DLT at work. > > > + Media cost > > > > I'd guess that 8mm and DAT come in first and second here. > > Hmm, not if you consider the short lifetime of a DAT cassette. OTOH, > i've got a pile of QIC-150 cartridges on a shelf stemming from > software vendors like you mentioned, so they are for free, and they > still serve well enough for small quantities of data. The TDC 4222 is > probably about 5 years old now, and so far i haven't needed more than > 10 of the higher-density (and more expensive) cartridges. Wilko _ ______________________________________________________________________ | / o / / _ Bulte email: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl |/|/ / / /( (_) Arnhem, The Netherlands WWW : http://www.tcja.nl ______________________________________________ Powered by FreeBSD __________ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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