>If some company would put a few brain cells together, they'd realize
>there's a market for an AFFORDABLE desktop LTO4 or LTO5 drive. LTO
>tapes are relatively cheap but the LTO4 and later drives are insane
>prices, even for used ones. $1,500 or more for a tape drive?! The
>tapes can be found for $40 or less. Used LTO1/2/3 drives can be
>found for decent prices, but their uncompressed capacity has lagged
>behind newer hard drives.
Gregg:
I used to work on an enterprise backup/recover app (NetWorker) so I'm
pretty familiar with high-end tape drives. I've talked with HP, IBM
and Quantum about the large market waiting for a USB interface LTO3
or 4 drive, but the volumes they run at are so low that the prices
remain high, and they don't care to risk trying to enter a new
"low-end" market, no matter how profitable it might become.
That said, I just checked NewEgg and you can get a Quantum or
Tandberg LTO-4 drive for under $2k - which may seem like a lot, but
they really are built for enterprise use, and won't break in a year
and a half. I currently run a couple of LTO-4 drives (thanks to a
good friend at HP), and what I've learned is:
1: When you're backing up video, expect about ZERO
compression. Video is already seriously compressed, so there's no
gain there. I normally get about 820 - 850GB per 800GB LTO-4 tape.
2: The tape drives are so fast that you will be limited by your disk
and computer speed. (They can do over 80MB/s uncompressed - but my
quad-core system is lucky to actually write about 1/2 that
speed. Remember that you're backing up files, not image, so there is
all of the OS overhead involved)
3: Recovering video files from LTO-4 is VASTLY faster than
recapturing from DV or HDV. (The video tapes run at about 3.5 MB/s
and I'll see 40MB/s recovering from LTO).
So - yes, LTO is expensive, but you will probably outgrow the
capacity limit on the drive before you see any hardware problems, so
the purchase price will get spread over quite a few computer
lifetimes. (Since I've been the recipient of HP's generosity over
the years, I've migrated all of my LTO-1, LTO-2 and LTO-3 tapes to
LTO-4 largely to save space: 8 LTO-1 tapes fit on one LTO-4....)
>I consider it a 'holy grail' to have an offline or near-line backup
>that can copy a hard drive to a single piece of media which costs
>less than the drive being backed up. Extra bonus points if it does
>it without compression. AFAIK, Linear Tape Open is the only one that
>can do that, except for the LTO drives costing more than several complete PCs.
If you're really looking for a reasonable alternative, the Quantum
DLT-V4 drives (160GB native) can be found for under $600 US with a
SATA interface, so you won't even have to get a SAS or SCSI
HBA. The tradeoff is lower capacity and somewhat more expensive
media - about $38 per 160GB vs $28 per 800GB for LTO-4 {tape4backup.com}.
edc
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