On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]> wrote: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Tape_durability > > Seems pretty durable to me - 4 years, if entire tape written once per > week. That seems unlikely.
Beware. Understand what specifications are actually saying. That particular scenario is not a directly applicable characteristic. Nobody accesses (reads or writes) every block on a tape once and only once before accessing it again. When I researched this, any given spot on the tape was rated at X number of passes, individually. If one spot on the tape is passed more often (for whatever reason), that still counts towards wear limits. When you start getting errors on the tape, you retire it (at least, I hope you do), so it doesn't matter if 99% of the tape is good if 1% is degraded. In particular, the beginning of the tape tends to get read/written a lot more often, because that's where the volume header is. The table given in that Wikipedia article cites a link that 404's, so I can't even begin to determine what the manufacturer might have been talking about. We sure as hell don't get four years out of our once-per-week LTO2 tapes before they start generating unrecoverable data errors. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
