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IBM tape drives - good? bad?

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  • IBM tape drives - good? bad?

    Just wondering if anyone out there has had any experience with IBM tape drives. The model I'm considering (for a home system) is the 20L0549 which uses Travan 5 tape (10/20 gig size).

    Pros? Cons? Suggestions?

  • #2
    I would also like to find out about tape drives. The last one I had was a POS, and when I needed it the most, it took a dump!

    Oboy
    Time to make the wafers!
    Oboy Inside!

    intel P4 2.26 @ 2.957Ghz

    "Life isn't like a box of chocolates...it's more like a jar of
    jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow."

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    • #3
      Currently I have an ancient HP DLCZ Dat drive in my old system that maxes at about 2gb compressed.
      I've also got an external DLT15/30, which I've yet to hook up. Given the cost of DLT tapes, I bought a spare, cheapo 30gb Hard disk for backup (20gb compressed to 13gb in 3 hours ) last time I needed a backup.
      Then a mate gave me a pile of DLT3 tapes to use...
      Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.

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      • #4
        Victorian, I sell them...and to be honest the biggest problem with IBM tapes is usually that the bundled software is a bit difficult to set up properly. No more than that, however; they usually do the work well.
        Sat on a pile of deads, I enjoy my oysters.

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        • #5
          But I take it that you can use pretty much any backup software that you might want to with them?

          Do you find that they hold up as well as any other major brand of tape machine hardware?

          BTW, anyone have any idea as to how well (if at all) mp3s will compress with backup software on a tape?

          The reason I ask is that one of the main reasons I'm considering a tape backup is about 80 gigs of mp3s that I'd like to move off my hard drives and the thought of the effort to burn them to cds just makes me cringe.

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          • #6
            I've yet to see a tape drive that reaches it quoted compressed capacity. If your lucky you'll get between the uncompressed and compressed figures i.e. for a 12/24Gb DAT the max your likely to get is 18Gb.
            When you own your own business you only have to work half a day. You can do anything you want with the other twelve hours.

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            • #7
              MP3 files will not compress very much at all. I'd be surprised if you got them below 98% of original size. Formats like MP3 and JPG are <I>already</I> compressed data formats, so there's not much room left to do more.
              Gigabyte P35-DS3L with a Q6600, 2GB Kingston HyperX (after *3* bad pairs of Crucial Ballistix 1066), Galaxy 8800GT 512MB, SB X-Fi, some drives, and a Dell 2005fpw. Running WinXP.

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              • #8
                Well, I'm not worried too much about the compression with the mp3s as even 10 gigs per tape (on a 10/20 tape) beats 700 megs per cd.

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