Setup cascade drive pool

[Petter Hahne]

We have a DAT24 drive model C1554. Problem is that its capacity is reached. I now want to add an other drive and setup a cascade drive pool. When the first tape i full it will continue to the next tape in the new drive.
Question: Can I buy and use a C1555 drive for this purpose? The C1554 doesn??t seem to be available anymore.
I??v read somewhere that the drives have to be of same type or product-id.

[Eugeny Brychkov]

I would recommend to purchase DAT autoloader. It can hold 6 tapes (5 data tapes+1 cleaning).
DAT40x6 http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/automatedbackup/autoloaders/dat40x6/index.html
Eugeny

[Petter Hahne]

Thanx for the tip but that does not answer my question.

I can also say that this is an internal drive.

[Dave Wherry]

What software are you using to backup with? If you are using any of the enterprise class packages like DataProtector, NetBackup, NetWorker..., then yes, you can cascade. Actually you may be better off running the drives concurrently. Writing to both. This can significantly decrease your backup time.
If you are using lower level tools like fbackup, tar, cpio..., you will not be able to cascade, without manual intervention or scripting. You'll need to break your backup jobs down into two different jobs.

[Petter Hahne]

I??m using Backup exec 7.0 for backup. According to the manual this program supports setting up a cascade drive pool.
My question is:Can I use a C1555 drive with my older C1554 to accomplish this?