Michael C. Robinson ATA-100 hard drives are often the same drives as their SCSI models except for one difference, the controller on a scsi drive has additional chips that allow independent operation from the CPU. Temperature and dust seem to be the biggest problem for hard drives as well as repeated rebooting. On a server though one doesn't reboot often, the dust problem can be addressed by filtering the air, and temperature... Ultimately the best solution isn't hard disk or tape, it's nonvolatile ram.
Unforunately, there probably aren't eny large enough batteryless nonvolatile ram drives made which are in any kind of price range that is reasonable. One way to get nonvolatile memory is to take volatile memory and add a battery system to it to keep it charged. In this case you'd probably want a solar panel rigged up to your charger eventually to lower your electric bills. I have an old tape drive, a QIC 88. All the tapes are bad and even when the drive does do a backup I've been told that it doesn't check the integrity of data written out to the tape. At least some tape drives go bad far sooner than has been suggested :-( If I could find a tape system that can read 60-100 gigabyte tapes for $500 or less maybe I can split the cost with my dad. Otherwise, $1100 is simply too much money for a system that takes six tapes for a total capacity of 144 gigabytes.
