Re: Looking for tape drive suggestions

[George Kelbley]

We recently upgraded from DLT8000.  We choose SDLT320 and its working 
great.  The primary reason for us was read compatability with our older 
archive tapes, and the cost was somewhat lower.  Since we've only had 
the new changer for a couple of months, we can't attest to its 
reliability, but this is our third OverlandData unit and we've had very 
few problems.

Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 at 11:02am, Mike Brodbelt wrote

So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or
other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important
thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or
external drives?

I have both AIT and AIT3 drives here, and they are quite nice.  While it's 
true that AIT is a Sony standard, they have a very long roadmap for it 
(through AIT6 IIRC), and it's not like Sony is going away any time soon.

That being said, these days I may well lean towards LTO.  I've heard very 
good things about the hardware compression in LTO drives.

Regarding external vs. internal, I strongly prefer external.  Tape drives 
can get hot.

--
George Kelbley                  System Support Group    
Computer Science Department     University of New Mexico
505-277-6502                    Fax: 505-277-6927