[WBEL-users] Errors mounting raid device

[John Morris]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Michael Squires wrote:

> I'll agree that tapes are expensive and tape drives even more expensive
> (and often agonizing slow), but there are applications where they're
> needed.

Perhaps, but I like the idea of external firewire drives.  Large capcity
tapes aren't exactly cheap and the drives are insane.  Look up pricing for
a drive and a dozen tapes with 100GB+ capacity and then compare to a dozen
cheap IDE drives in $70 firewire enclosures.  With firewire drives you can
do offsite storage and all of the other major benefits of tape and still
have the fast backup times and instant access of a hard drive, especially
when you need to recover from a disaster.  You also can pretty much forget
some of the other problems with tape, finding a replacement for an obscure
drive that has crapped out and hasn't been make in years,
interchangability problems between drives, etc.

Eventually the slightly higher cost of drives+enclosures make tape a
little less expensive per GB and will even balance out the high upfront
for the tape drive if you buy enough, but unless you are the sort of site
that has big automated tape libraries I don't see the losses in speed and
sheer convience making up for it.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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