Re: AIT drives
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. 2. Would it be wise (possible??) to cycle those tapes in six or eight week periods? (We have cd backups for the archive.) 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? thanx, / jakob -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: AIT drives
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 -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: AIT drives
Does anyone have any experience with the LaCie AIT 35 GB/70 GB drives? I've been using an APS 35/70 AIT drive for ~5 months now on a biege desktop 266MHz G3 running MacOS 9 Retrospect 4.1 (now 4.2) to do nightly backups on 24 disks on 12 Macs 2 PC's with zero problems from the tape drive. At ~$2K for the drive plus something like $300 for an Adaptec 2940UW ultra wide SCSI card it was financially much more attractive than ~$4K for a 35/70 DLT drive. I had a LaCie 15/30 DLT drive for ~2 years before that was very happy with it but the $$$ difference was too much to pass up when our data storage outgrew the DLT. Based on my experience to date, I would certainly recommend this AIT drive SCSI card. Regards, Ted Ted Baker System/Database Administrator 7 Borehole Bldg., 61 Rt. 9-W Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University Palisades, New York 10964 U.S.A. 914-365-8663 (voice) 914-365-3182 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/BRG -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: AIT drives
Yup - we use lots of AITs - not the LaCie ones specifically, but since it's just the SONY mechanism in a LaCIE case it should be representative. Currently we're using the 25/50 tapes but there's very little difference in the new ones. We have over 4,000 AIT tapes in current use over the course of the last year and there have been 8 tapes that had problems which were all mechanical drive issues. So that's a damage rate of .2% on very high usage backup servers. Note that that's stricly the tapes that were 'eaten' as it were. We've never seen an instance where data written to the media was unreadable. I haven't found a tape system that's completely bulletproof since you are dealing with moving physical tapes around a complex path, but the AIT's have been about as close as they get. You might want to look at the VXA tape stuff as well since the media is the same as far as I've been able to determine and I think the drive are marginally less expensive. Cheers, Erik Ableson On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 01:17:17PM -0800, Victor Orly wrote: Does anyone have any experience with the LaCie AIT 35 GB/70 GB drives? -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]