Yes, I was going for affordable! A tape drive with native capacity of 160 Gig costs over $2600 US (SDLT). And tapes cost $89 each. You need to do a lot of backups before tapes cost less than an IDE disk. An IDE disk is so much faster too. The best price I could find for a 160Gig ultra 100 was $107 Hitachi A Hitachi 160 Gig SATA disk is $113. SDLT tapes cost $89 each (10 for $890) I am sure you could get a quantity discount on tapes, but disk drives too. Now we just need to be able to hot plug ultra 100 disk drives. SATA hardware supports hot plug, but I read Linux does not support that yet. I do want to be able to remove my backup and put it in the shelf. A business should have 2 copies where one goes off site. I did have a power supply fail in a way that it fried everything in the box. I think line voltage was send directly to the 12V or 5V line. DVD drive, disk drive, motherboard, RAM, video card, ... all gone. So if my backups were on-line with the same power supply as the main disk(s), all would have been lost. Some people seem to think tape is better than disk. Somehow since there is no filesystem, so you can't delete a file by mistake. So, fine, just use the disk drive the same way. Use cpio and output to /dev/hda or similar. The only thing tapes have that is better than disk drives is the eof and eot marks. I can put 10-20 daily backups on the same tape and let the hardware track the position of each backup. With disk, you would need to count the blocks used, and track the start and length of each. Or you could use a file system, but like I said, some people seem to think that has too much risk. Guy -----Original Message----- From: linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Gordon Henderson Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 9:35 AM To: linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Good news / bad news - The joys of RAID On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Yu Chen wrote: > > Now if someone made an affordable tape drive and tapes that could backup > > 200G per tape, that would be cool! > > You don't know? they have that already, AIT-4, LTO as I know. I think the key-word here was "affordable" I use DLT drives, which I think go up to 220GB native right now, ('m only currently using 160GB native drives), but right now the cost of media at about £60 each is about the same as a 160GB IDE drive.. Easier to manage though, and the cost of the tape drive is still round about £3500. But how valuable is your data? (As I keep telling my clients!!!) I've tried to build servers that have a max. capacity of 200GB per partition, but I have clients chomping at the bit for bigger partitions, thn it becomes a PITA to backup to tape. I don't think the requirement for tape backup is going to go away in the near future, anyway. I just wish tape technology would keep up with disk technology. RAID is great, but it's not for archive and backup. Gordon - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
