[TriLUG] tape drive recommendation?

[Mike Broome]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 12:39:40PM -0400, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> Price not being an object, I'd pick DLT.  This being a home server, I'd
> imagine price would be an object (and you seem to have said that).  DLT is
> fast and reliable, but expensive for both drive and media.   Sony's AIT
> standard comes just underneath DLT but the tape are pricey.  There are some
> DAT offerings beneath AIT but I'm not up-to-date on those.  Last time I used
> DAT (2 years ago) it was slow and you had to switch tapes frequently for
> large backups.

Well, since it will be my own money I'm spending, price will have to be
an object, but I won't necessarily go with the cheapest drive based on
price alone.

From what I've seen on the web today, there are a lot of different tape
standards to choose from.  So far I haven't found or hear anything that
leads me to lean towards one over another so I'll probably decide based
on density, speed and how quiet the drive is (since it's for use at
home).

It looks like in the DAT category, there are the following
standards/tape types (with the native capacity in parens):  DDS-1 (?),
DDS-2 (4GB), DDS-3 (12GB), DDS-4 (20GB).  So the DDS-4 DAT might be
large enough for what I'm planning to back up.  Not sure what the
transfer rates are.  (I see that Stay Online has some Sony DDS models.)

Anybody know if there are any gotchas with using tape drives under
Linux?  I haven't run across a supported tape drive list so I'm assuming
that all (most?) SCSI and IDE drives should just work.  I've seen
mention of some USB drives.  Besides being fairly slow, I'm guessing
from my previous forays into USB-land in Linux that support for these is
probably sketchy at best.

Mike

-- 
Mike Broome
mbroome@employees.org