I, too, am in the market for a new tape drive. Here's what I've found:
Exabyte M2: 60GB, 12MB/s, $3777 ($80 media)
Sony AIT-2: 50GB, 6MB/s, $3289 ($94 media)
DLT 8000 : 40GB, 6MB/s, $3915 ($64 media)
Sony AIT-1: 35GB, 3MB/s, $1913 ($88 media)
VXA-1 : 33GB, 3MB/s, $939 ($67 media)
DDS-4 : 20GB, 3MB/s, $1072 ($33 media)
Mammoth : 20GB, 3MB/s, $2126 ($56 media)
DLT 4000 : 20GB, 1.5MB/s, $1352 ($64 media)
Mammoth-LT: 14GB, 2MB/s, $1193 ($35 media)
DDS-3 : 12GB, 1MB/s, $777 ($16 media)
Eliant 820: 7GB, 1MB/s, $1160 ( $8 media)
DDS-2 : 4GB, .51MB/s, $606 ( $7 media)
-Native capacity listed, compressed capacity is typically 50% more
-Sustained transfer rate listed
-Cost is based on internal model with wide SCSI connector (if available)
-VXA-1 tape drive is even cheaper through Ecrix July promo ($539)
-Media listed is highest capacity format in single packs
So, the fastest, highest capacity tape drive is the Exabyte
Mammoth-2. Unfortunately, it's one of the most expensive as well.
My understanding is that DLT drives aren't well geared for the
repetitive start-stop-start pattern of incremental backups done by
Retrospect. DLT drives tend to overshoot the tape and thus spend a
lot of their time rewinding. This drive is best suited for backing up
a large continuous flow of data. Sound right?
I've used AIT's in the past and I've been very happy with them. A few
broken tapes but it wasn't too difficult to disassemble the Seagate
autoloader and remove the tape.
VXA-1 seems like the deal. Good capacity, fast performance,
super-duper reliability, fantastic price. Unfortunately, it received
the worst performance scores by PC Mag
<http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/reviews/0,6755,2455855,00.html>.
But, that test was against only the higher performance versions of
the other tapes drives (M2, DDS-4, DLT 8000, and AIT-2).
DDS (aka DAT) is definitely the most popular, price is good, media's
cheap. But, everyone I know with DDS drives has had perpetual
reliability problems (both media and mechanism). Someone said that
this had to do with the thinner tapes found in the DDS-2 drives and
that the problem had gone away with the DDS-3 drives. Anyone verify
this?
So, which is the winner? For me, I'm torn between the VXA-1 and
AIT-1. The PC Mag article made the VXA-1 look pretty bad but I'm
thinking that it's just relative and that the performance numbers for
the AIT-1 would be pretty similar. Plus the July Ecrix promo making
the VXA 70% cheaper than the AIT forces me to try out the VXA. Even
better, I can buy two VXA drives for less than the cost of one AIT
drive and make a poor man's autoloader!
One last alternative, a friend of mine decided to skip the whole tape
drive thing and buy a Quantum Snap Server 4000 ($2,469) instead. The
Snap Servers ship with DataKeeper. Anyone have any experience with
this? It only works under Windows but it allows "real-time"
continuous back-up. On the Snap Server 4000, you get up to 120GB of
storage.
The obvious drawbacks are:
-finite storage tops out at 120GB (or 90GB with RAID 5 enabled)
-no off-site backup
-no complete images of hard drives
-no historical backup
The advantages are:
-allows users to recover files without admin assistance
-high performance (hard drive vs. tape)
-real-time backup
-no backup server to maintain or purchase.
At 1:34 PM -0500 7/24/00, Robert Cooper wrote:
>Hello List,
>
>I am looking into DLT vs DDS for a tape library. I went and read the old
>posts on the Ecrix and Mammoth DLT drives. I was wondering what the user
>experience has been with them now, since it has been some months since these
>posts were put up.
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