Tape Drive Suggestions

[jebenson]

Hello all,

My work finds itself in need of a new tape drive. The last drive we bought (Exabyte VXA-320) provided...substantially less than stellar performance. So, I thought I would ask some fellow professionals for recommendations for a new tape drive. Here's some info about my environment:

- ARCServe 11.1 SP2

- Adaptec 29160 SCSI card, although we can get a new SCSI card if necessary. A related question: I've seen external USB-connected tape drives advertised. Does anybody know how well they work, if they will work with ARCServe, etc.?

- Mixed Windows Server 2003 and Server 2000 domain.

- About 80-100 GB of data to back up

- We can't afford an auto-loader or tape library, so the tapes need to have enough capacity to do a full backup on one tape.

Thanks in advance for any advice. If you need any more information, just let me know.



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[hudman]

We bought a tabletop USB/eSATA based Quantum DLT-V4 back in July that uses the DLTtape VS1 tapes that provide 160/320 GB with the DLT-V4 drive. Paid $745 for the drive (came with 1 tape and 1 cleaning tape) and $236 for 6 tapes. Even though my server was bought in 2003, it didn't have 2.0 USB ports so I ended up buying a PCI USB card and all runs very quick and smooth. If you have external SATA ports or buy a PCI SATA card with external ports you will get even better performance. The USB speed is comparable to the internal SCSI AIT drive I replaced. I'm using ARCserve backup r12. You can check CA's website to see if your version will work with it. I think it will work with r11.5 but not sure of the other versions except r11.0 and lower won't work. I ended upgrading to r12 anyway because I had r11.0 which didn't work with the drive.

 

[davidmichel]

I think the DLT drives are very good but any more I have been sticking with LTO. It does not matter which brand LTO they are all fine drives and the best overall tape drives available. Along with that I would also recommend staying with SCSI due to the high level of reliability and error checking.

However it is up to you to determine what is best for you. Another option due to the small amount of data you might want to consider USB hard drives. A handful of 1tb drives should hold 40 backups with plenty of extra space.

With ARCserve hard drives would be used via File System Devices. 1 directory = 1 FSD = 1 tape. So on a 1tb drive you could create 8 or 9 FSDs, you always want to leave plenty of extra space just in case.