Need DDS4 tape back-up device suggestions 1

[PhotoJenic]

I've been placed with the great honor of purchasing a DDS-4 tape back-up device.... but I know relatively nothing about them.

All I know is it should be a DDS-4 (20/40Gb), internal and reasonably priced. It will be used to back-up four WinNT servers nightly with BackUp Exec and we will be manually swapping the tapes every morning. We're purchasing a new unit because we currently have a DDS-3 and are going over the tape limit.

I've looked around, but knowing very little I'm slightly confused on what to purchase. Does anyone have any suggestions on a good brand, what I should look for and things I should avoid? I realize I'm completely out of my league on this one, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[2ffat]

If you are set on using Backup Exec, I would suggest seeing what drives they support. That should eliminate some choices.
James P. Cottingham

http://www.ivcusa.com

 

[kwadhwani]

Please help, I need to purchase a DAT drive for my company, to enable it to have backups of critical data. The software supplier for a particular piece of software supports the software via backups (in case they need to rebuild the databases etc.) They use a DDS3 HP 24i Surestore DAT drive and do not know when they will go over to DDS4.
I would like to use a DDS4 Dell Powervault 100T , since it can store more.
Will I still be able to save data onto a DDS3 tape from my DDS4 hardware, and send it to my supplier, who will then read it on their DDS3 machine?
The alternative is to purchase a DDS3 machine, although I feel the life span on this hardware and the tapes will be limited with DDS4/5 around?
Can someone advise please.....??

 

[2ffat]

I'm not certain about the Powervault but some of the DDS3 drives could still read/write DDS1 tapes. They were intelligent enough to sense which tape was inserted. See if that is still true for DDS4.
James P. Cottingham

http://www.ivcusa.com