Tapes....

[denniswrenn]

How many of you have tape drives?

a freind of mine has seen 20GB tapes for like $50.. I was wondering if using tapes for backup/storage was fast and reliable?

Thanks,
Dennis

[parksie]

The drives aren't particularly cheap, but the tapes are. They're very reliable now, as long as you look after the tapes. Speed-wise they've improved significantly...we back up our school server's 10GB drive pretty quickly...can't remember how long it takes. It's slightly slower than a zip drive, but whips it on capacity

Cool

I'm definetly getting one of those(probably won't be for a few months though).

I used to use the 50GB onStream of my work, but they have it now also use a 8Gb HP surestore.

I'm probably only going to get an 8gb HP.... it only costs about $225, I saw a 200gb IBM(drive, not the tape) for about $1500

[Jamagei]

Yeah, we have a 20Gb Sure Store. They take a while to get started but when the are going they fly

Also have a 2Gb ditto drive (seen at iomega it can now take 3.7Gb) that runs at 4Mps, uses its own ISA slot thou

a Jaz drive is good, fast but not too large, but when it says 2Gb that is native, but as its like a HDD to windows a lot of backup software dosent like it, veritas will use the 1Gb Jaz drive but not the 2Gb

[HarryW]

You can get a 20 Gig networkable hard drive for about £250 + VAT. Rack mountable, if you have a rack.

Well Ive seen a 30Gb HDD for £100

[HarryW]

I'm talking about a rack-mountable box that you plug an RJ-45 connector into, not just a hard disk.

Ive seen cases for HDD's which allow you to plug it directly into a network, and I dont think you would really want to put one HDD into a rack slot, waste of space, but I dont think D has a rack....... well could have, im thinking of getting one myself

Do you have a rack D?

[HarryW]

Since he's deciding between a 19" and a 17" monitor, I don't think space is exactly at a premium.

I'm not quite sure what a rack is...

[crptcblade]

wow, I saw fast and tape drive in the same sentence, and almost sh*t myself...But then I remembered that my old tape drive is just that...old. It's a Ditto tape drive, and back when I used it, it took almost 3 HOURS to back up a 2 gig hard drive...now you know that was back in the day...

[HarryW]

A rack is like a big cabinet with brackets to fit rack-mountable servers in. They're just basically long, wide and thin (in height) boxes with a server in them. Racks get more than that put in them though, like UPSes and print servers and switches and routers and blah blah blah anything that you might need for a network.

They're basically used when you have so much hardware around that space is a problem, so you get everything rack-mountable and it all fits into cabinets. Keeps stuff neat. If you're not running a reasonably big network you're not gonna need one.

[HarryW]

Oh yeah and the networkable hard disks I was talking about - the 20 gig ones are comparitively small in capacity (although you can get them with smaller capacity drives), they are usually running at hundreds of gigs, but they start to cost £1k+ when they get much bigger.