[lug] Tape Drive Recommendation...

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 06:34:47PM -0600, Ryan Kirkpatrick wrote:
>Secondly, I would highly recommend the Ecrix VXA-1 tape drive. It can
>holds lots of data, is fast, quiet, reliable, and best of all it works

Actually, this was what Dusty was interested in.  I had forgotten that
they were trying to promote these drives to the LUGs (something like a
buy 5, get one free deal).  He was concerned that for the price
of the tape drive alone, he could get another box and rsync with
it.

At the time I didn't have the pricing of the media.  A problem with
the Ecrix drives is the media is $80 per tape (33GB uncompressed
capacity).  That's more than 35GB AIT media (though in that case
the drives are around twice as much).

In general I've been dissatisfied with tape media.  A decade ago tapes
were 4 to 10x the capacity of the common hard drives.  Now we've
nearly reversed that.

Sure, a DDS4 drive will cost you $900 (for 20GB uncompressed capacity),
but the Ecrix drive + 10 tapes is $1300 with their generous discount.
DDS4 is $1150.  So, the discount they're offering doesn't seem like
such a good deal.

DDS3 is around $650 for a drive and $12 for 12GB uncompressed media...

The Ecrix stuff looks interesting, but the cost of the media needs to
come down before I think it's really a contender.  I'd think about it
for use where I'd otherwise use AIT but probably not for home.

Sean
-- 
 "Science exists to lend belief to sci-fi movies."
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python