tape backup drives?

[Greco101]

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/sys/448196800.html

Although I'm 99.9% sure it's not 140TBs... lol... I'm pretty sure this is a sweet deal if it is in fact in 100% working order. Should I go for it? How do these things work?

I found this: http://www.foxtec.com/products/view.asp?ID=4537

[alexanderH]

wtf? Since when do they make tape drives that store 104 TB? I guess under compression they can get into terabytes but 104 is too little for his business?
"Provides 800 GB storage physical capacity (1.6 TB with 2:1 compression)"
IBM drives do that, and those are the biggest storage tapes I have seen before.
The relatively unknown storage is taking back all the GB's I guess :P
Interesting find Greco

[SgtM]

Based on the price alone.. no. I've never been a big fan of tapes, and he's not selling the backup software to go along with it. Even the storage capacity sucks. It's only 140 Gb (or 280 Gb with 2:1 compression)You could get a 500 Gb drive and external enclosure for cheaper. I have a 250 Gb drive with all my stuff on it. If my main drive crashes, the most I'll lose is a couple E-mail addresses.

[Greco101]

Exactly... Why the hell would anyone spend thousands of dollars (http://www.buy.com/prod/quantum-px500-series-sdlt-600-1-drive-lvd-scsi-field-upgrade/q/loc/101/201960068.html) for 600GBs? There must be something to them besides being able to store stuff.

anyone know what's so special about these things? Why in the HELL are they so expensive and WHY would anyone, business or no business, buy one?

EDIT:: From what I've read so far, they are pretty much only beneficial for backing up data bases for businesses and such considering you are suppose to back up once a week. It's pretty bad ass that they take little tapes (http://cgi.ebay.com/DELL-DLT-IV-80GB-tape-cartriges-LOT-of-41_W0QQitemZ180166190273QQihZ008QQcategoryZ39978QQ ssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) that can easily be dated and put away. There are tons on ebay for cheap though for whatever reason? They also write at twice the speed of a 7200rpm drive. Interesting.

[Airbozo]

Tape media is considered more fault tolerant than disks and will last longer in storage. I have extensive experience with backups from desktops to servers and setting schedules complete with media testing and recovery using tape libraries. I used to work for Storage Tek (now owned by SUN) building tape units and testing them.

I have in my career managed tape libraries that will hold about 200tb of data (without a reload) and that thing will not hold more than 200 gb max. Never use the hardware compression on a tape unit, since if that library died, you would have to have the exact same model/series in order to read the tapes.

Check out this monster;
http://www.sun.com/storagetek/tape_storage/tape_libraries/sl8500/

And there are bigger ones.

[Greco101]

HOLY... WHAT THE... GOD... MOTHER....WOAH!!!!! Why kind of businesses use something like that?

240 Petabytes... I've never even heard of that.

[OvRiDe]

One thing should pointed out is this is a tape library meaning it holds multiple tapes. As AB said when it comes to business tape IS the way to go still. One of the main reasons is the ability to store multiple TB of data off site, easily. Disaster recovery is a major concern when it comes the day to day operations of any corporation.

@Greco101 - The link you put to the little tapes are known as DLT tapes which only hold around 80GB/160GB compressed. The ones that this one takes are AIT tapes.. They are even smaller and hold a lot more .. up to 520GB compressed for the AIT4 tapes. The new AIT5 drives and tapes will hold 400GB uncompressed and 800GB compressed.

Currently our storage solution is a library with a single AIT4 drive and a 15 tape magazine. So that comes out to about 7.6TB of storage. We are considering upgrading the drive to an AIT5 which would expand us to 11.7TB of storage. When your backing up 23 servers consisting of File Servers, Database servers, Web servers, and Mail servers, it doesn't take long to fill that up in a hurry, even when doing differential backups.

All that said.. for the home front. Tape is tedious and cumbersome. As SgtM said, a hard drive is more then sufficient at much less cost.

But it would still be a REALLY neat TOY to have for that price!!! :D

[SgtM]

HOLY... WHAT THE... GOD... MOTHER....WOAH!!!!! Why kind of businesses use something like that?

240 Petabytes... I've never even heard of that.

We have bigger ones at work. Our tape cabinet is about 25 feet long and 6 feet tall. I wish I could take pictures for you guys. You would absolutely LOVE our data center.

[chaksq]

I used to use a tape backup with an old win 3.1 laptop.

Now that I think of it I have some 3.5" tape backup drives hanging around in my old severs.

[Dilphat]

first what's a petabyte(as i am too lazy to google, about to pass out from the tylenol), also i heard that big business's used silo's for backing up data, do they do that still?

[Wasabisam]

first what's a petabyte(as i am too lazy to google, about to pass out from the tylenol)

A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes. Petabyte is abbreviated as PB.

Sam

[Greco101]

lol, I can't get over how much storage that is... 1000......terabytes.
1,000,000 Megabytes...
1,000,000,000 Kilobytes...
1,000,000,000,000 Bytes...
4,000,000,000,000 Nibbles
8,000,000,000,000 Bits

I could never imagine more than that although 20 years from now will probably be in the newest iPod lol.

[SgtM]

first what's a petabyte(as i am too lazy to google, about to pass out from the tylenol), also i heard that big business's used silo's for backing up data, do they do that still?

Our setup at work looks similar to this. IBM 3494 Robotic Tape library (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/3494/index.html)

http://www.vcu.edu/vcu/ucc/atloutside.jpg

http://cern.ch/it-div-ds/HO/picture/r3494_combined.gif

[Dilphat]

yeah sgtm that thing, when I was talking about the silo's I meant that thing. where it has a robotic arm and it changes tape drives.

[calumc]

I wonder how long it would take me to fill that with pirated movies? :p

[Greco101]

I wonder how long it would take me to fill that with pirated movies? :p

I don't think we're allowed to talk about that here.

[Airbozo]

One cool thing about one of the Tape libraries I used to work on (storage tek timberwolf 9740), is that it not only has a bar code reader to inventory and keep track of the tapes, it also had a regular camera that would _slowly_ scan the bottom of the cabinet after you closed the door to make sure there were no foreign objects left behind (like a screwdriver or a tape that fell out of a slot) before it went into high speed mode. And high speed mode is quite impressive! Many years ago PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), in SF had 3 silos named Huey Dewy and Louie, that were large enough for several people to walk into _with_ the robotic arm. Tape technology is fun stuff. This is the first large tape unit that I worked on;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Poland_Jaworzyna_Slaska_-_Museum_of_Industry_and_Railway_in_Lower_Silesia_-_tape_memory_PT3_for_Odra_computer.jpg/297px-Poland_Jaworzyna_Slaska_-_Museum_of_Industry_and_Railway_in_Lower_Silesia_-_tape_memory_PT3_for_Odra_computer.jpg

[Quakken]

Scalability is much better with tape libraries. One library for quadrillions of bytes. Quadrillions.

i just nerdgasmed a little bit saying that.