The current eWeek has an article which discusses this issue. http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=28513,00.asp
...In fact, analysts at research company Gartner Dataquest, in San Jose, Calif., project significant growth for new technologies that have the potential to cut backup costs. Gartner estimates that technologies such as Serial ATA hard disk drives will grow from a market of fewer than 5 million units this year to more than 280 million units in 2005, with Serial ATA becoming the dominant disk drive connection in 2004. The decreasing price of hard drives-vendors claim ATA drives will be able to provide storage at less than 1.7 cents per megabyte-will play a major role in this growth. While ATA's potential to augment or even replace tape for backup is great, products are just beginning to roll out. Vendors including Seagate Technology LLC and Storage Technology Corp. are expected to release drives later this year that are based on Version 2 of the Serial ATA specification. The new version will allow these drives to operate at rates of 1.5GB per second, nearly twice the speed of the current Parallel ATA interface version, known as ATA 100. At organizations such as Steamboat Springs, every penny saved on storage makes a huge difference, which is why Morrison has already begun to investigate ATA hard drive technology for backup. Morrison has one RAID array from RAID Inc., in Methuen, Mass., that is attached to his servers (which run Red Hat Inc.'s distribution of Linux) via Adaptec Inc.'s SCSI adapters. Morrison's financial applications-including the MySQL open-source database and a database from Progress Software Corp.-are backed up on a rotating schedule every night to external digital audiotape drives from Hewlett-Packard Co. About 60GB of data is backed up each night, a process that takes as long as 8 hours because of a slow network connection. While the tape drives allow Morrison to throw more capacity at the backup process as needed, the expense involved in managing the tape backup is one reason he's looking at ATA technology as a potential replacement... -Steve Follmer "Hear me now, believe me later" -Hans and Franz -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of robinsom Sent: Saturday, June 29, 2002 9:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Tape Drives, why? Michael C. Robinson 100 gigabyte hard disk is less than $200 while the last check on high capacity tape drives turned up prices exceeding 4 times that for maybe a quarter the capacity because advertised tape capacity is compressed capacity. Worse, tapes don't last, they have a three year shelf life if they are stored properly and the tape doesn't physically break when it winds around the spools... Is it possible to configure Amanda to backup to a harddisk or Raid volume instead of a tape? What about CD-R, it's the cheapest media and it has a thirty year shelf life where the only downsides are the capacity, the risk of disks getting scratched, the fact that they are made using mercury, and the risk of them getting exposed to UV light. I'm asking about the issue because the recommended book to read on Amanda suggests that Amanda doesn't offer an alternative to tape backup. My last search on tape drives suggested that a high capacity unit that can handle 40 gigs per tape is between $800 and $1000. I could buy a lot of ATA hard drives for that kinda cash.
