Cheap Tape Drives for Linux?

Doug Muth asks: "Does anyone have any suggestions for a specific brand of tape drive I should purchase to use under Linux? SCSI tape drives are expensive (plus they require you to get a SCSI adapeter), so I've been looking at some IDE TR-4 tape drives. However, according Red Hat's Hardware Compatibility List, while IDE tape drives are "compatible", Red Hat does not support them." Anyone willing to pass along some helpful suggestions and/or more informaiton on the Red Hat/TR-4 issue?

Comments

How expensive is "too expensive"?

[Wakko Warner]

DDS-2 SCSI drives will hold 4 gigs (8 compressed) and are very reliable. I have a pair of them at home, and they're not that expensive, by my standards. You can get them brand new off Pricewatch for about $150 or so now, and I've seen them at swap meets for about $100. Onsale had (perhaps still has?) Aiwa DDS-2 drives for %75. A SCSI card for these things shouldn't run you too much -- you don't need anything too fancy to drive them. I've got mine connected to an old Adaptec 1521.

I really recommend SCSI for backups, mostly because everything supports it and it's pretty much foolproof. It really isn't all that expensive either.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Reliable?

[bluGill]

Don't forget about reliability. Quote from one of our top marketing people (I work for STK, we own the tape market on the high end) "It used to be that all unix systems, SUN, HP, SGI, etc came with Exabyte 8mm tape drives, and it was great, you could do backs all day any time no problem. You never could read the tapes backs, but at least you could check the little box that said you had a backup." (Exabyte has improved since then, and since he is in marketing he was stretching the truth a little) His point was that backups are worthless if you can't read them back. Some of those older tape drives wrote tapes that could only be read on the drive that wrote them (as they got older the heads went out of allignement), and then you were screwed if you had a failure.

That said, SCSI is not that expensive, and scsi drives have a better chance of working. Just buy a scsi adaptor. Soon you will be like me and refuse to touch IDE again... :)

I too am looking for a good backup. Problem is backups are not easy. I want to backup /home which will soon move to a 9 gig disk, or even bigger. (Amanda isn't happy about dealing with partitions bigger then the tape - not saying amanda is the best way to backup), I really want to backup some macs over my network, and nothing deals with that.

reliability is key for businesses!

[chargen]

Whenever I recommend a tape drive, it's SCSI DAT all the way. I will let the client know of the cheaper models and then I explain the reliability factor. The whole subject really boils down to this: If you attempt a restore using a cheap drive and it fails, what is the additional price you've just paid? Now that said, let's look at the usage. If this is for business, buy the most reliable tape drive you can afford, if it's for home and you don't care if you lose your 8GB mp3 collection by all means purchase a cheap drive. But then if you don't care about lost data, why are you backing it up? -Pete

Avoid Sony SuperStation

[calvid]

Avoid Sony Superstation drives at all costs. I found out the hard way that they are not Linux compatible at all. I've been using an HP Colorado (7 gigs uncompressed) without problems. I don't know that it qualifies as "cheap", but maybe one of the smaller HP's will do the job for you.

Don't do it!

[shario]

I have one word for you: Don't. A running disk drive backup is only good for deletion accidents and broken disk drives, but what if you have

• a power surge (burns both drives!)
• an earthquake
• a fire
• a kernel level messup making both filesystems unusable
• a rm -rf / when disk is mounted?

Having the backups up and running is of course good, but also means that you can't store older backups nor have them off-site which makes a backup system quite worthless, IMHO. But you were looking for cheap :)

DAT's right

[h2odragon]

Expensive intially can save untold cost later. I bought my Sony DDS3 drive back when they were twice what they are now, and it's been worth every penny. Come to think of it, that drive is the single most expensive computer component I've ever bought; it was money well spent. I've had to restore from tapes as much as 6 months old: no errors, no problems. The QIC80 drives I used to use were not that reliable. Travan etc. is pretty much QIC80 on steriods.

The only problem I have with it is that it's internal compression is about equivalent to gzip -1; I like better. A reasonably fast machine, the alternative compression program of your choice, and the buffer program can solve that problem.

Also, don't buy the "new" Adaptec 2940UWPro (the one that can drive all the connectors at once) SCSI controller to hook your new drive to, it doesn't speak to Sony tapes, and Adaptec's response is: "We know. Too bad." Excretus Est Ex Altitudine

Re:DDS-2 is cheaper than Travan

[AngusSF]

Once you start adding a few tapes, DDS-2 is cheaper than Travan. The break-even is somewhere around 10 tapes. Plus the last time I looked you couldn't clean the Travan drives, while the DDS-2 can be cleaned with a cleaning cartridge.

Current prices from CDW
Sony SDT-7200/BM DDS-2 drive $440
10 DDS-2 tapes $9-10 ea $100 total $540

Seagate TR-4 Travan drive $240
10 TR-4 tapes $31-32 ea $320 total $560