[H-GEN] Tape Drives

Jason Henry Parker jasonp at uq.net.au
Sat Jan 5 22:17:15 EST 2002


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"Frank Brand" <fbrand at uq.net.au> writes:

> I have had no problems with removable drives and been using them for
> years.

> I had a Dell recently that just would not accept
> drives thru the adapter but would happily accept the same drive
> plugged straight in.

These two statements seem to be at odds.

> I can't see why there are problems as they are really just an
> IDE pass through device. Although I have struck some boxes that just
> dont like them.

Individual tapes can be had for less than the cost of a new disk.  I
shudder to think of how expensive it would be to buy a new disk every
month as I made another `this tape/disk will never be written to
again' backup.

> I know that there is usually a vast difference between cost of IDE
> and SCSI drives without even considering the cost of the SCSI card.

The cost of the card is negligible.  Tape drives of any breed are
hardly fast, so there's little point using the latest u-beaut speedy
SCSI card in the system.

My employer has two SCSI cards installed; one hosts the disks, and the
other is a slower and cheaper card that hosts only the tape drive.  It
seems to work well.

Redundancy costs money.
-- 
||----|---|------------|--|-------|------|-----------|-#---|-|--|------||
| Men are Figs!                               http://linux.org.au/conf/ |
|                   --Ann Burlingham                   jasonp at uq.net.au |
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