On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 03:24:17PM +0100, jakob krabbe wrote:
>
>
> AIT = Advanced Intelligent Tape.
>
> 1. I belive this have been discussed before, but please correct me if I'm
> wrong when I say Retrospect doesn't take advantage of the chiptechnology
> inside those tapes.
Currently Retrospect does not talk to the chips on the tape. In most cases, the
utility of the chip is minimal since most of the ideas that people were going to use
it for are duplicated within Retrospect already (tape indices, etc.) The one thing
I'm hoping that Retrospect will do is embed the name of the tape on the chip so that
you don't have to physically load each tape all the way into the loader to determine
the tapes that are inserted. Well - two things - the tape also tracks overall usage
and error rates on write operations so it would be useful to have a flag that checks
this data and alerts you when an arbitrary reliability threshold has been exceeded
before you reuse a tape.
> 2. Would it be wise (possible??) to cycle those tapes in six or eight week
> periods? (We have cd backups for the archive.)
Yup - that wouldn't be a problem. One of the key advantages of the AIT/VXA Advanced
Metal Evaporative (AME) physical media is that it doesn't degrade with use as rapidly
as does a DLT or DAT tape that uses a glue binder to attached the magnetic media to
the physical tape itself.
> 3. It is possible to connect and use the drive to a computer that just have
> the regular SCSI or dose the drive demand Wide SCSI to work at all?
You can hook it up to a regular SCSI - you just won't see the high end performance.
On a beige G3 I've seen throughput up to 200Mb/min using the built-in SCSI port.
There's an excellent white paper available from Spectralogic that covers all the
technical details quite well at:
http://www.spectralogic.com/resources/brochure/White_Paper_Tape_Drive_Technology.pdf
Cheers,
Erik Ableson
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