Re: SCSI or Firewire for tape-drive backups?

In article <1huwnaf.spgfae15i2p4hN%see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jon) wrote:

Paul Sture <paul.sture.nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1huwjrq.1l7k58e1g533pbN%see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jon) wrote:

Michael Vilain <vilain@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1huvsnq.1nasb79smcbu0N%see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jon) wrote:

cj <siegebell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

a few seemingly simple questions stumping me:

Such as: Why tape? Why not disk?
That ought to stump you, IMHO.

Disk is much easier, quicker and more searchable. And not too
expensive
these days.

John, can't you get me the TP reports from the archives for 2004, 2005,
and 2006? They should be in the backup tapes...

Certainly Sir. That will take around an hour.
But if you allow, I can get them from the disk-based backup in around
three minutes, is that OK?

Oh, and by the way, can you sign this purchase order for yet another
terabyte of disk space?

Sorry, could not resist. :-)

And that would set us back - oh, about 300$? (2*500GB SATA)
Or twice that if you want to mirror it, admittedly.

What kind of SATA drives are those prices for? I'm thinking that for
off-site backups you want external drives with suitable enclosures. I
don't really like the idea of transporting naked drives.

How much are serious backup tape cartridges these days, anyway?

(Minor rant - when you want to look up technical specs, all Google gives
you is prices. Today when I want prices it's giving me technical info)

From http://www.netcllc.com/site/preprint-cartridges-detail.php?type1=DLT

To compare apples with apples, Fuji prices:

DLT IV (a bit old hat nowadays) $32.47
SDLT I (160/320 GB) $40.88
SDLTtape II (300/600 GB) $82.68

LTO tapes (change last 3 letters of above url to LTO)

Ultrium-3 - 400/800GB $56.04
Ultrium-2 - 200/400GB $32.74
Ultrium-1 - 100/200GB $31.82

It's hard to make a straight comparison, since those going for the upper
end tape solutions are very likely _not_ using SATA drives, but ones
designed to give full sustained rates 24 hours of the day.

I must also point out that while those 2:1 tape compression ratios are
often achievable for commercial application data, many in this newsgroup
are looking at backing up files, be it music or images, which are
already well compressed, so they should look at the non-compressed
capacities of the tapes.

No, seriously: I do admit that tape has its use as an archival medium.
But I find it harder and harder to justify it as a day-to-day backup and
retrieval medium as the $/GB ratio for HD storage continues to plummet.

I'll agree it's getting harder to justify tapes, but when it comes to
backups, I'm conservative by nature. I cannot forget the summer when the
4GB disks in a large disk farm were dying like flies; it seemed that
they all reached the end of their natural working life at the same time.

Now another data point. I just got a second external firewire drive for
my iBook and over the weekend was experimenting with various backup
ideas. A simple copy of 23 GB from one disk to another i(n preparation
for subsequent incremental backups) took 26 minutes. IOW, almost 1 GB
per minute. Definitely not bad for a home setup!

--
Paul Sture
.

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