With your argument, were would you stick 10 IDE drives then? Add the cost of controllers, etc and you start to add more and more cost. The deal is, backups to tape are done to tape when the media cost savings justify the outlay of cash for the hardware. Like it was said before, most small business could get away with burning a CD. But what you *can't* do is ignore the fact that if you want to be safe, you *must* do backups. Disk is cool, but make sure that you fully account for the expense in your environment. -- Cheers -- James > Ben, > I think you missed a very important aspect. The actual investment of > the tape drives. A SDLT or LTO drive is going to run from about $4000 > on up. According to datacomm warehouse, a HP 230 external LTO drives > runs $3700. An SDLT drive runs $4300. You can't compare just the media > costs with that of the drive. Let's consider a 1TB of data. > > SDLT: > $4300 + (10 tapes * $50) = $4800 > > LTO: > $3700 + (10 tapes * $130) = $5000 > > AIT2: > $2800 + (20 tapes * $90) = $4600 > > IDE: > 10 Drives * 270 = $2700 > > DDS4: > $900 + (50 tapes * $24) = $2100 > > >From these numbers (using DataComm Warehouse pricing), you can see that > to backup 1TB, the IDE drives are actually the second cheapest. And > from a raw performance point of view, they far exceed all the other > alternatives from a random access standpoint, and they are comparable to > even LTO from a transfer rate point of view. > > Sorry... had to address this point. > > On Wed, 2002-02-06 at 13:14, Benjamin Scott wrote: > > Here are some prices from a recent Datacomm Warehouse catalog: > > > > Item GB Cost $/GB > > -------------- --- ---- ---- > > IDE HDD 100 270 2.70 > > AIT2 50 90 1.80 > > SuperDLT 110 150 1.36 > > LTO Ultrium 100 130 1.30 > > DDS-4 20 24 1.20 > > > > As you can see, hard disk is actually the most expensive media, not the > > least. This whole "hard disks are cheaper" thing is a myth propagated by > > people who have never actually looked at the numbers. > > _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/Pages/howto.html
