Tape drives? Why are most SCSI?

Jarek Zabczynski

Jarek Zabczynski

Veteran
I've been looking at tape drive systems for possible archive solutions. Most of the ones I see are only SCSI and a select few running usb. Why is this? SCSI is considered and ancient and dying technology by many. Why can't these things run off firewire 400/800? Surely SATA is fast enough for these things. Though it's not like any of these systems write quick enough anyway.

I've been looking primarily at AIT LTO and DLT systems.
 
JesterJJZ said:
I've been looking at tape drive systems for possible archive solutions. Most of the ones I see are only SCSI and a select few running usb. Why is this? SCSI is considered and ancient and dying technology by many. Why can't these things run off firewire 400/800? Surely SATA is fast enough for these things. Though it's not like any of these systems write quick enough anyway.

I've been looking primarily at AIT LTO and DLT systems.
Click to expand...

LTO-3 will run somewhere in the area of 4 gigs per minute, which is probably way too fast for firewire...don't know about SATA. I usually clock somewhere around 185-250 gigs an hour (SCSI/PC).

Quantum has some promising looking equipment that works (PC and MAC) with gigabit ethernet. http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/LTOUltrium/LTO-3/Index.aspx Check out the LTO-3 "A" notes . . . (opps, what NoahK said).
 
I can't seem to find a price...that's usually a bad sign. I'm looking for something under $2k. How much is this puppy?


....eh...8 grand...
 
That's about right- if you want to spend under 2 grand for tape backup you're talking used SCSI DLT or AIT drives. There's always blu-ray as well.

Noah
 
We bought our SDLT-320 drive (which is really 160 or thereabouts when you're talkiing video data) for about $700 used on Ebay a few months back. Got a nice PCI-Express x16 high-speed SCSI card used off Ebay for about $100, and some slightly-used-but-serviceable SDLT tapes for about 8 bucks each.

With the Retrospect backup software we use, all in, our backup solution cost $1300 including a boatload of tapes. It works like a champ, is reasonably fast (about 1 gig/minute actual writing time), and does a full verify of everything it writes to ensure it's readable.

This doesn't include the cost of the computer, we had a minimally used PC that was reasonably new that became the primary backup machine.

LTO and SDLT-600 (which is really 300) is a little faster writing but otherwise similar, and Tandberg's SDLT-800 is apparently substantially faster but VERY spendy ($3000 or so for the drive alone)

We use Retrospect both to back up our HD shoots (basically we treat the SDLT backup as the equivalent of the DV master) as well as all of the captured and edited content we keep on our RAID array.

Hope that helps.
 
I use LTO3/SCSI interface. Fast and stable. I used to have LTO3 with fibre channel and SAN. That was insanely fast but expensive. I thought there were some cheaper LTO3/SCSI setups out there now....
 
Do you need softwhare to record to a LTO Tape

Do you need softwhare to record to a LTO Tape

Do you need software to record to a LTO Tape, Like DVD/CD burning software ???

Or can you drag your files to the drive like a floppy or firewire drive ??
 
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