[TriLUG] tape drive recommendation?

jeremyp at pobox.com jeremyp at pobox.com
Wed Aug 15 19:29:06 EDT 2001


On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Mike Broome wrote:

> It looks like in the DAT category, there are the following
> standards/tape types (with the native capacity in parens):  DDS-1 (?),
> DDS-2 (4GB), DDS-3 (12GB), DDS-4 (20GB).  So the DDS-4 DAT might be
> large enough for what I'm planning to back up.  Not sure what the
> transfer rates are.  (I see that Stay Online has some Sony DDS models.)

I have a DDS-4 drive, 20GB capacity but I can get a little more than that
with hardware compression.  They bill it as "20/40" but obviously the
compressed capacity depends a lot on your data. It works pretty well; it's
surprisingly fast.  I don't normally wait for it -- I just switch the
tapes and the backups happen later at night; each backup is under 25 GB so
I don't have to switch the tapes mid-backup.  (I don't have a changer.)
 
> Anybody know if there are any gotchas with using tape drives under
> Linux?  I haven't run across a supported tape drive list so I'm assuming
> that all (most?) SCSI and IDE drives should just work. 

The drive I have is SCSI (Python 06240-XXX according to the kernel) just
works... no configuration was necessary, other than setting the SCSI
ID.  I think the DDS-4 is perfect for my situation -- the tapes are
decent capacity at 20 GB, and aren't too expensive at about $30 each.

As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I use the Arkeia backup software, which
works well for me but isn't free for larger than a small installation.

Regards,
Jeremy

-- 
My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.




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