Need new removable storage drive: DVD or Tape?

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

Firstly nVidia has caused me hours of trouble, and rendered my PC unbootable, I absolutely will never buy anything again from them because of this, but not only that, only ATI makes video cards with the features I need, so I couldnt get an nvidia one even if I wanted too.

And by the way, the bottleneck in ANY system, is the hard drive, no upgrade whatsoever will provide a performance increase as big as getting a good hard drive setup, you could have a Pentium 200 mhz running miles faster than a 3.6 ghz if it has a faster hard drive.

That's why I got an SATA RAID 0, and had an IDE RAID 0 before, no other upgrade provided an as big difference, in fact, when I upgraded my cpu, and doubled my ram, I didnt notice a change AT ALL.

Also, why bother with laser printers? Inkjet costs less for the printer, then less for the ink, and prints WAY faster than a laser pritner in the same price range. No to mention the quality is normally 8 times better on inkjet, and miles better on a photo quality inkjet, not to mention all inkjets print in color.

I've done a LOT of reasearch to findthe best printer for my high volume printing, and laser had disadvantages in EVERY aspect (printer cost, toner cost, print speed, print quality), the one and only advantage laser has is water proof prints, which I don't need.

I ended up getting an HP business inkjet 100, it prints 23 pages per minute and 20 in color, thats 3 seconds for a full color page, whereas the color laser printers at 5 times the cost took over 1 minute per color graphics page, and not to mention the output quality is absolutely terrible compared to an inkjet print, and toner cost is double that of ink cost per page.

[confus-ed]

The 30,000 re writes (or at least uses, I assume they mean re-writes) is from:
http://www.storagebysony.com/reselle..._xref_ait1.pdf

Ah .. so it means 30,000 indivual write operations per tape (think like as in every time the Ide light flashes) not uses

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

Huh? The IDE light probably flasghes over 30 000 times in a single backup, what do you mean?

Also, my uncle asked me if the tapes can be used more than once, I told him my older tapes got daily backlups for 5 years and still worked great, he said the tapes were he works could only be used once, is there really a tape that only lasts 1 use?

I am aware of WORM tapes (write once read many), could this be what he was talking about? If so then the tape is made to allow only one use no matter how many it could survive.

[confus-ed]

Huh? The IDE light probably flasghes over 30 000 times in a single backup, what do you mean?.

I mean everytime the heads engage to write on the tape - btw the ide light flashes on any activity (read /write/ query cahe, refresh, all sorts of stuff) - thats what they mean - on a tape its serial, but each file is still a write in 'optimum conditions' (as in some files will be many writes) for tape it might be say 10 ? (takes a flying guess ) different serially written operations per file/job which means only 3,000 'uses' then .. less anyway

[confus-ed]

..Also, my uncle asked me if the tapes can be used more than once, I told him my older tapes got daily backlups for 5 years and still worked great, he said the tapes were he works could only be used once, is there really a tape that only lasts 1 use?.

Policy probably at work ? (you don't want your 'enterprise level'(means a big fat company with extra critcal stuff etc) main backup d/b put on some two year old tape thats been used a 1000 times already! you use new tapes for that & several copies which as you are 'enterprise class' you keep at least one of forever unused, incase you have to rollback your systems to that point for some reason - loads of folks have facilities to hold all their data like this -every bank I've ever worked at has loads of 'one only unique master historical tapes') & I've never heard of 'worm tapes' as that's usually a term used to apply to cd/dvd write once as opposed to re-writeable .. tape is only 'not rewriteable' if you choose to make it so ..

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

About the 1 use tapes, that makes sense, he worked for a company that makes passenger jets. And I saw WORM tapes from sony, they just have a code, either key holes on the bottom, but I doubt that since it could very easily be modified, probably either something on the memory chip (these sony tapes store the directory in a memory chip embedded on the tape so there's no rewinding all the time to read/update it), otherwise it mus be a signal on the tape itself.

They are most likely made for situations like you described.

About the 30 000 uses, I'm still not sure I understand, this drive uses helical scan (a drum spinning extremely fast, like in a VCR but much faster), as soon as there's activity, you can hear the drive pull the tape out of the cartridge, wrap it around the drum, and then hear the drum start (it spins at 6,400 RPM), it then only stops the drum and puts the tape back in the cartridge after a few seconds of inactivity.

Well, as I was looking for the drum RPM on the sony website, I came accross this:
"High reliability with MTBF of 300,000 POH (100% duty cycle), head life of 50,000 hours, and media uses of 30,000 end-to-end passes"