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"Another hard drive?"

Yes. Tape has not kept up with hard drives, in fact they're now more per gigabyte than hard drives, very different from 90s prices. Even just the tapes themselves are more expensive than hard drives per gigabyte, and that doesn't include the thousands it can cost for a multiple terabyte autoloader tape drive.

There is really nothing else as cheap as hard drives per gigabyte. I use a external USB2 SATA dock and swap a few SATA drives. And honestly I'm not all that worried about backing up with modern operating systems. We've come a long away from Windows 95, where I was restoring from my Eagle Travan-3 1.6/3.2gb once a month.

yes a google search shows just how hard it can be to find.

It's not like a reputable company such as CDW sells them or anything... I'm one for pulling ideas out of your ass, but come on...

I know I'm offtopic, injecting facts into this debate, but I thought it might be interesting to bring up the VXA tape format. It allegedly survives all kinds of abuse like freezing, see Freezing Test

I have never tried these drives, and would love to hear from someone independent who has.

I have.

The problem with tape drives isn't really the technology, it's the price. The tape drive you're talking about retails for over $1,000, and you then have to purchase $85 tapes for it.

If you look on CDW for a 250GB Western Digital hard drive, you'll find them for around $130.

Taking that into account, you're looking at buying over 50TB of storage capacity before you even come close to breaking even. It just doesn't make sense to go with tape given the cost of disk right now.

The problem with tape drives isn't really the technology, it's the price. The tape drive you're talking about retails for over $1,000, and you then have to purchase $85 tapes for it.

If you look on CDW for a 250GB Western Digital hard drive, you'll find them for around $130.

Taking that into account, you're looking at buying over 50TB of storage capacity before you even come close to breaking even. It just doesn't make sense to go with tape given the cost of disk right now.

I agree about the tapes. You don't have to worry about mechanical failure of the tapes.

I'd recommend looking into Exabyte's VXA-320 (VXA-3) tapes. They promise 500 writes (as compared to an average of 50 writes with DAT), their "packet technology" provides for error correction and does not depend on a continuous stream of data to efficiently write to tape, and the quality of construction of Exabyte's VXA drives appears to be very high.

The cost of VXA is very reasonable, especially when compared to technologies like LTO. (With LTO, the cost per gigabyte for the media can be higher than for hard drives.) If reliability is a concern, you're probably comparing to Travan systems, which were just plain evil. (Travail is more like it.) Exabyte claims that you can dunk the tape in coffee, dry it out, and re-read it just fine.

But I'm not just repeating what's on their website; I have actually used the hardware and like it.

I agree about the tapes. You don't have to worry about mechanical failure of the tapes.

I'd recommend looking into Exabyte's VXA-320 (VXA-3) tapes. They promise 500 writes (as compared to an average of 50 writes with DAT), their "packet technology" provides for error correction and does not depend on a continuous stream of data to efficiently write to tape, and the quality of construction of Exabyte's VXA drives appears to be very high.

The cost of VXA is very reasonable, especially when compared to technologies like LTO. (With LTO, the cost per gigabyte for the media can be higher than for hard drives.) If reliability is a concern, you're probably comparing to Travan systems, which were just plain evil. (Travail is more like it.) Exabyte claims that you can dunk the tape in coffee, dry it out, and re-read it just fine.

But I'm not just repeating what's on their website; I have actually used the hardware and like it.

Doubtful that this will happen anytime soon, considering that many organizations still use large scale tape drives for backup (example: http://www.exabyte.com/). If tape drives are still around today, who's to say hard disks won't exist 20 years from now? What's more likely is that flash drives may become more viable for mainstream desktop computers but larger-density hard disks could be used in some other market. You'll see the drives fulfilling a different niche, perhaps.

Guess we'll all just see.

No, I meant 500 Megabytes per minute. Some research may have helped you respond.

VXA says you'll get 43GB per hour, but in a real life you'll see ~500MB per minute which works out to about 30GB/hour. With that speed, we have backups dumped on to a 1TB NAS then written to tape. It allows the backups to flow as fast and smooth as possible to tape without having to worry about network congestion.

If you actualy run your tape backups on a nightly basis, religiously, you have no business buying anything less than a DLT drive. The DAT drives and all the other cheaper solutions are "consumer-grade", meaning they're only intended for the occasional use (such as doing a full backup right before wiping out or upgrading your hard drive). They'll quickly wear out and break down if you do much more than that with them.

What about VXA? We run at least five tapes a week through our VXA-1 drive, and have had almost zero problems with the tapes (I think we had one tape "wear out" and get eaten in two years.) And it's not like we don't know if our backups are good. Just last week some one snagged some files they accidentally deleted off an old tape.

Looks like we'll have to come up with a different naming scheme. Someone's already trademarked the exabyte.

Couldn't it weaken the trademark to have Western Digital or Seagate making a '9 exabyte' hard drive? Or HP or Sony making an 'exabyte-class' tape drive? Wouldn't a judge find (in favor of Exabyte) that the consumer would easily be confused?

*The USPTO are idiots.*

Keep in mind that you could also back it up onto a mere 1.5 million 100GB tapes.

• 12 TB native capacity
• 432 GB/hour native transfer rate

• 12 TB native capacity
• 432 GB/hour native transfer rate

My old Exabyte 8200 uses standard 8mm video tapes which will fit 2.5GB. There's actually a sony 8mm mechanism in there very similar to what they used in camcorders...

Hey... Isn't Exabyte trademarked? They oughta sue! It's not fair that these hard drive manufacturers get to use the name of their company when describing HD capacity. They should send everybody cease and desist letters! Too bad they didn't have a patent! Think of the licensing fees they could charge!

2 terabytes, 216 gigabytes/hr.
Not cheap, but if you have the money for a disk array, you most likely have the money for a tape library, too.