which tape drive type? LTO or VXA or DLT or AIT???

[philx509]

I'm a home user with Dantz Professional, but I thought that this forum would be the right place to ask about different high-capacity tape drive types.

 

I'm trying to decide which tape drive technology best fits my needs. The ideal drive will store on one tape about 100-200 GB before compression. (but I would settle for 50-100 GB before compression to keep costs down). SCSI-based. Also a "reasonable" growth path with backwards compatibility for media.

 

I've done some investigation into drive capacities and transfer rates. My biggest concern, aside from cost, is that the higher-capacity drives have transfer rates that my system/network can't sustain. Exabyte claims that their VXA drives are the only type that will change the tape speed to avoid "shoeshing." In practice, is this true? What about other drive types? Is there an effective lower limit to the speed change? E.g. if a drive can do 12 MB/sec, can it slow down to say 3 MB/sec?

 

My other concerns arelong-term storage reliability and drive size. I would prefer an internal drive that can mount in a CD drive bay. Some of the LTO drives I've seen are "full-high" and won't work for me.

 

To keep costs down, I will probably buy a drive that is at least one generation back from the current products. I might try to get a drive cheap on ebay.

 

Are there good deals on new _media_ on ebay? What about buying media used? I've heard mixed about that.

 

Once I know which drive types to consider, then I can do my research on specific models, cost of media, etc. Right now, I just don't know where to start or how to decide.

 

Here are my needs. (interesting maybe but not necessary to answer my questions.)

 

1. My home LAN is currently about 25 GB for a total backup. I expect that to grow to at least 50 GB within two years. My current drive is a 7/14 GB Exabyte Eliant 820, and the media changes during a backup are inconvenient to say the least.

 

2. I am a photo hobbyist and I am (finally !!) going digital. I plan to start by scanning about 4000 black and white negatives and 8,000 slides and color negatives. Using a high-res Nikon scanner, I figure that that I'm going to end up with about 250 GB, before I cull any bad images. And once I get a digital camera, I figure I could generate several GB in a day's shooting. (With digital, "film" is free. That leads to lots more pictures than with a film camera.) And of course, as I start to edit/process these images, I will generate many more GBs.

 

Instead of using DVDs to back up my photo collection piecemeal, I would prefer to use tape, so I could fit the entire collection on several pieces of media. And not have to deal with 'data base' issues because the DVDs have images that I've culled.

 

thanks,

 

X509

[philx509]

Quote:

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I am a photo hobbyist and I am (finally !!) going digital. I plan to start by scanning about 4000 black and white negatives and 8,000 slides and color negatives. Using a high-res Nikon scanner, I figure that that I'm going to end up with about 250 GB, before I cull any bad images.

 

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Uh, I went back and redid the calculations. My existing photos will need about 1 TB. No way will I back that up on 4.7 GB DVDs.

 

So, please help me out here even though this is not a business application.

[natew]

Hi

 

Keep in mind that your photos are already in a fairly compressed state after scanning so you won't get anywhere near the compression rates that tape companies promise. Long story short, base your purchase on the native capacity of the tape.

 

Throughput isn't such a big issue either. Chances are your PC will be able to keep up. Even if shoeshining does occur it will just slow the backup a bit. It shouldn't make much of an impact on storage capacity.

 

Any of the tape formats you mentioned are fine.

 

Thanks

Nate

[philx509]

Quote:

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Hi

 

Keep in mind that your photos are already in a fairly compressed state after scanning so you won't get anywhere near the compression rates that tape companies promise. Long story short, base your purchase on the native capacity of the tape.

 

Throughput isn't such a big issue either. Chances are your PC will be able to keep up. Even if shoeshining does occur it will just slow the backup a bit. It shouldn't make much of an impact on storage capacity.

 

Any of the tape formats you mentioned are fine.

 

Thanks

Nate

 

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Nate,

 

Thanks. Good point about the photos already being compressed. I will be outputting TIFF files, because that is a lossless format. It's also way, way bigger than a typical JPEG. For the scanner I'm planning to get, at full resolution (4000 dpi) the typical output file is about 125 MB!

 

Between the different formats, is any one inherently "better" or "less expensive" than the others?

 

philx509

[Lennart_T]

Quote:

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I will be outputting TIFF files, because that is a lossless format. It's also way, way bigger than a typical JPEG. For the scanner I'm planning to get, at full resolution (4000 dpi) the typical output file is about 125 MB!

 

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OK, TIFF pictures may be compressed using Retrospect's software compression (for DVD drives) or any tape drive's hardware compression. (This type of compression is lossless.)

 

4000dpi will give you pictures slightly less than 4000x6000=24000000 pixels (for normal 35mm film). That's almost 23MB for b/w (8-bit gray) or almost 69MB for 24-bit color. How come you end up with 125MB?

 

I suppose you know that TIFFs may be compressed using the lossless LZW compression?

 

Anyway, I would burn one DVD for each roll of film for easy access. For b/W pictues, one DVD for three films would do fine. (This would be normal data discs readable anywhere, not Retrospect type discs where you need Retrospect to read the discs.)

 

As for the types of tape, I have experience using DLT IV (35GB per tape) as well as AIT-2 (50GB per tape) and both works just fine.