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Best tape drive

 
Bob Slater
Occasional Advisor

Best tape drive

I have an old tape drive that is on it's last legs. I'm looking for opinions on what is the best tape drive for my hp9000 rp3440 unix box we running HPUX 11i. Ease of use, speed and reliability are of course the main concerns. Any opinions or comments are appreciated.
6 REPLIES 6
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Best tape drive

Ultrium 960 (LTO) !!!

Very fast and reliable!

In case you are searching a stand alone:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/ultrium960/index.html


Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Best tape drive

Ultrium (LTO) or DLT would be my choice. One thing to bear in mind that there are cases where a slow drive is actually faster (so that yes, less is more). Your backup software has to be able to feed data fast enough to keep one of these high-end tape drives streaming or it will write a bit, stop, rewind, and write again -- taking a 100x or so performance hit. Fbackup is fast enough unless badly configured but you might actually see cases uses singly-threaded applications like tar or cpio where the slower drive (because it can be kept streaming) is faster than its faster replacement.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
DCE
Honored Contributor

Re: Best tape drive


I agree - LTO is the way to go. It is fast, effiecient and wokrs well with most backup applications. Plus it has the capacity to match today's larger drives.

Dave
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Best tape drive

Classic DLT drive are only able to go 2 speeds - high and low. Here applies Clays concern. LTO can go smooth between highest and lowest speed. first advantage.

DLT drives are using a "mushroom" to catch the tape. Once a tape has lost its "mushroom", it can damage every drive once inserted into it. SDLT has it too for compatibility reasons.

LTO is using a different mechanism. another advantage.

Finally, LTO is faster if required.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Best tape drive

Different, less capacity, less speed, less cost but good to do an ignite backup - DDS, e.g.

http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/compatibility/tapebackup/PA-RISC/index.html

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Best tape drive

What I want to add: I'm still impressed by an fibre channel attached LTO drive storing an ignite backup after about 7 minutes.

(it really was the whole vg00)

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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There are only 10 types of people in the world -
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