Affordable Backup Hardware for Today's Systems?

Sloppy asks: "Hard disk capacity (and usage, thanks to multimedia) has blossemed in the last few years, and my DDS2 tape drive is no longer adequate for the job of backing up. What concerns me is that I don't see anything on the market that I can replace it with, except for autoloaders that cost thousands of dollars and will likewise fall into obsolesence very quickly. Does anyone have any suggestions for backing up dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of gigabytes?" and JQuazar asks: "There's a nice thread here on software, how about tape drive hardware? I'm looking for opinions and recommendations for a hefty (10 gigs or better) tape drives that will work well with Linux. Onstream's ADR50 has some nice press, anyone used it? I'm willing to shell out for a good drive but must hold costs under $1000. For the record I want to make frequent backups and not archives, else perhaps a strong case could be made to just use CD-R. For discussions sake, the smallest partition is 5 gigs and I don't want to swap media more than once."

Comments

Affordable storage

[billybob2001]

Send it all into space (I don't know, maybe use satellite dishes or something) and then download it from the SETI site when you want it back again.

Re:Try Ecrix

[Ryan Kirkpatrick]

As one who has a VXA drive at home and work, I highly recommend them! They work great with Linux, no problems encountered was so ever. As for transfer speed, I typically see 1 MB/sec to 2.5 MB/sec transfer rates from Ultra (Wide) disks to a narrow drive (VXA drives are available as LVD wide and SE narrow). One oddness of the drive is that write speed is actually faster than read speed, usually about 0.5 to 0.75 MB/sec. Nothing major, but just interesting.

As for price, they do come in about $1k, but they have been having a promo deal going for the last couple of months (always extended by one more month lately!). With the deal, you can get the drive at almost 50% off (one drive only of course). Sign up for their email newsletter for more details on the promo deal. Though, tapes are moderately expensive, three sizes, ranging from $30 to $80 each, last I checked.

Overall, they are very good drives and I would recommend them as the next step up after Onstream and Travan style drives, and one step below DLT style drives. They provide many of the benefits of the Exabyte Mammoth drives, but at a much lower cost.
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