At first: Gene you seem to have used a different email-adress so your reply didn't make it to the list.
I just quote it here: Am 22.11.2010 12:09, schrieb gene heskett: > I gave up on the use of an earlier dat machine after wearing out half a > dozen of them. Life of the rotating head seems to be not much over 1000 > hours, and while I am capable of replacing the heads myself, no one would > sell me the replacement head, claiming it took all sorts of fancy machinery > to do it right. So I wound up sending a $400 drive to Oklahoma City every > thanksgiving week, getting it back for about $350 COD sometime after > Christmas. Eventually I bought a big hard drive and switched to virtual > tapes, which have turned out to be many times faster _AND_ far more > dependable. Replaced once with no data loss after smartd complained, the > replacement is a full terrabyte and spinning flawlessly 24/7. For me, the > relatively much lower cost and the dependability are a huge plus. Throw in > that a recovery can be done from that hard drive in 5 to 10% of the time it > would take from purely sequential tapes, and the choice is an absolute no > brainer. I have spent less than 20% of the money for hard drives that I > would have spent on dat drives and tapes in the nominally 5 years since I > switched. > > For those that need off-site secure storage, just rotate the drive out for > another identically prepared one at the end of say every other dumpcycle. > Or, better yet IMNSHO, just ssh copy it over the net to the off-site > location, reducing the drives exposure to the knocks & bumps of the real > world. I have considered adding another drive to a machine that runs my > cnc milling machine just for that, on site, but in another building, also > on a huge ups, but the PATA interface on that particular motherboard > doesn't handle 2 drives per cable properly. For running the milling > machine, its not broke. > > But that demo's how one might think about 'off-site' and its all behind a > router/NAT on the local, much more secure address block. > > As for the head drum replacement scene, I have replaced around $80k or more > in dvc-pro broadcast videotape machines, they are about 1/5th the size of a > dat head drum, priced originally at $1500 ea, life 7 to 10k hours. I am a > retired tv CE, and a C.E.T. > > That, and a $1.33 will get you a big cuppa joe at 7-11. ;-) > > Advice is worth 2 cents, maybe. More than 2, for sure ;-) Your hints regarding the rotating head sound good to me ... and it also matches my experience with those devices. Harddisk-based backups are no option there, so I rather consider buying an LTO drive as I think (and read and google) that those drives and the used technology are more reliable ... I have an LTO2 here and some others (up to LTO4) at customers, good performance so far. Thanks, Stefan
