Michael C. Robinson There are many types of tape drives, how does one sort through all the options available on E-Bay lately ? Which tapes drives are in good condition and which aren't ? What is the quality of the various tape drive technologies ? If I wanted an 8 gig TR-4 for example or better yet a drive that can handle 10-24 gigs on a single tape what is the best way to narrow one down ? Price is a big issue, that's why I am looking at tape drives that can backup the systems I'm running even though they won't have as much capacity as the harddrives those systems are installed to.
I have heard that VXA is the ultimate because the tapes can take coffee immersion, is TR-4 still better for backup use than ATA-100? What do TR-4 tapes cost ? For how long will the TR-4 tapes be available since everyone seems to be atempting to get rid of theirs ? What tape drives should be avoided other than the under 8 gig models ? When do you buy bigger tape drives verses partition your harddisks into smaller chunks and back up the data to harddisk(s)/CD=R while the system still goes out to tape ? TR-4 drives seem to be acquirable in the $35-$50 range, has anyone tried to stripe multiple tape drives together, do RAID with tape drives so that five eight gig tapes is presented as say one 40 gig tape to Amanda ? Promise puts out a controller supported from the 2.2.19 kernel on for ATA-100 drives which plugs into a PCI slot and using one IRQ adds two drive channels to the system for around $30. Maybe over time I could acquire a second, third... fifth TR-4 eight or ten gig drive. Five tapes per full backup is still fairly reasonable depending on the tape size. Is it for certain that Amanda doesn't support multiple tape backups where a backup set is say four tapes and the drive can take one at a time ? Can software RAID be accomplished if the tape drives are installed, say five or more total, to two servers ?
