Using DDS-4 tapes in DAT 72 drive

[William Price_1]

We have several DAT 40 drives and an autoloader and a lot of backup tapes. We need more capacity, but it seems foolish to buy a DAT 40 autoloader since it is discontinued. However, to be assured of redundant restore capability onsite and at our recovery facility we would like to keep using DDS-4 tapes - i.e. we don't want to have to replace all our drives with DAT 72. Is this practical and safe ? The specs say the DAT 72 drive reads and writes DDS-4, but sales docs don't always tell the whole story.

[Lewis Finch]

You can read and write DDS 4 tapes with DAT 72 but is recommended that you archive the DDS 4 tapes and only use them for restoring data you need. Read/Write using DDS 4 tapes will probably impact the life of the tape drive

[William Price_1]

I may have been unclear and/or misunderstand the advice. We use these drives to make backup tapes and only occasionally ever read a tape (usually salvage for a user accident or to actually test the backups). So there's not much read/write, just write. So is that itself hard on the drive ? And if anyone can comment on How Bad - i.e. theoretically someday, or do they drop dead in a year (or just after the warrenty expires).

[Lewis Finch]

Here is a useful PDF on the care and feeding of your DAT 72 drive. Page 33 talks about media compatibility. Using DAT 40 media exclusively will shorten the life of the drive but by how much is a matter of how often you use it and and how much data you back up. It's sort of like asking "how long is a piece of string" http://h200002.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00070859/c00070859.pdf