Need new removable storage drive: DVD or Tape?

Again, I said Reliable MEDIA not reliable Tape Drive. Two of our AIT tapes started Tearing the Tape Media. it cost something like 300$ to fix.
Secondly - I never Dropped an HDD in my Entire Life. Let alone HDDs "park" the Magnetic head so Even if you dropped the HDD most chances the Data on the disc can still be salvaged. Currently I have W.D. 6/4 Gb sitting in My Motorcycle trunk that I use as a removable media for the last 3 years. never had any problems.
Don't forget that Tapes are more suspectable to EM and Environmental conditions.
I don't think you should backup your entire drive Daily - a Incremental/Diffrential Strategy is wiser in your case.

Signing off (my girlfriend is waiting...),
Gabriel

I didnt mean a fully daily backup, I normally do a full backup then incremental untl the tape is full and then start again.

2 of how many drives failed? 2 of 2 and 2 of 100 isnt the same, after how long and how many uses per week did they fail?

I also calculated that with a 230m (9055ft) tape and 160ips FF/REW speed, the longest possible time it would take to find a file is 57 seconds, which is much faster than my current drive. Not to mention the transfer rate is 4-10 times faster once it found the file.

Thanks

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

The fastest DVD-RWs are currently only 2x for DVD-RW, or about 2.5MB/Sec..

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Yeah to write (btw drives out definately that do 2.4x & new ones doing 4x) but reading is typically in the x8 or even x16 range. If you were writing to DVD I'd use burn once disks (<$1) & just make two copies to allow for any scratches mishandling etc later, which of course you can do at 8x, & if you hang on about two months I confidently predict 16x coming soon ...

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I also calculated that with a 230m (9055ft) tape and 160ips FF/REW speed, the longest possible time it would take to find a file is 57 seconds, which is much faster than my current drive. Not to mention the transfer rate is 4-10 times faster once it found the file.

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Huh ? your tape is faster than an eide drive, well its f. good then ! If you mean your current tape ,well say that :p ...

Just as a bye the buy what happens with vobs ? They are supposedly only allowed to be 1gig (dvd convention) so my tape drive is busy playing my movie, then it takes 57 seconds to find the next bit ... very high quality ! Or are these all converted to big fat mpegs ?

I dunno how many of these topics I've replied to, but Kato seems to have it !

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Originally Posted by Kato, & very astute too IMHO

..get the tape drive. your mind is obviously made up ...

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Despite the horror stories hard disks can often be resilient especially once inside a caddy .. I have a 40 gig drive thats been dropped down the stairs, dropped I dunno how many times in various car parks & generally been 'abused' for about 18 months & still works fine.

You seem anyway to take backup pretty seriously ! :D

Why did you ask for opinions if your mind is made up to get the tape drive? The NAS storage idea is the best performance/$$ ratio. Yes tape devices are tried and true but they are an old and dating technology.

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Huh ? your tape is faster than an eide drive, well its f. good then ! If you mean your current tape ,well say that

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Of course I was comparing it to my current tape drive.

If I put movies on it yes I will convert them to mpeg or any other format that would support streaming from the internet (which has audio & video recorded "side by side" in the file) because when I try to play a divx on my current tape drive, it plays 5 seconds, FFs/REWs 5 minutes, plays 5 seconds, and so on. But on the other hand, the Sony's so fast it could transfer an entire movie to my HD in less than 5 minutes if I want to format non streaming formats.

I've looked at removable hard drives and they seemed much more expensive than the tape drive, but I guess you mean standard IDE drives in a removable case? Anyway I found someone willing to sell me a Sony SDX-420C for $300 and free shipping so I'm gonna get it.

But I found HP AIT 35GB tapes at a store that ships them for much less than the stores that have sony tapes, I'm assuming HP tapes would work in it, right? After all they invented those AIT tapes.

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You seem anyway to take backup pretty seriously !

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After having 3 viruses in 3 consecutive years wiping out my entire c:, yes I do, thats what made me get my first tape drive :D And seeing how well they do for digital video playback adds a HUGE amount of use to it.

Thanks

sounds like you should put some of that money and energy into some reliable antivirus software.

if your software allows drive letter access to your tape drive, how is it any safer from viruses than a hard drive?

I had a reliable and updated AV each time I got a virus, AVs are useless if they are new unknown viruses like was unfortunatly the case those 3 times. Since then I disable real time scan on my AV and set it to scan once a week, its not worth the loss in performance if its only gonna protect from harmless viruses (compared to those that corrupt your entire HD).

The tape is safer because I leave one backup out of the drive all the time.

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

I had a reliable and updated AV each time I got a virus, AVs are useless if they are new unknown viruses like was unfortunatly the case those 3 times. Since then I disable real time scan on my AV and set it to scan once a week, its not worth the loss in performance if its only gonna protect from harmless viruses (compared to those that corrupt your entire HD).

The tape is safer because I leave one backup out of the drive all the time.

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Um yeth your not thuppothed to open the atachmenths or clik on ok when that window popths up when your downloading your p@rn. ;) :D

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Originally Posted by Gollo

Um yeth your not thuppothed to open the atachmenths or clik on ok when that window popths up when your downloading your p@rn. ;) :D

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yeah and it's always a good idea to disable real time protection and just scan once a week. . .. . .becaue why take the performance hit and be protected from thousands of virus that your definitions can identify when there might be a new one that isn't in your definitions file. https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gif
there's some solid thinkinghttps://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gif

I also find it humerous that he'd disable real time protection because it hinders performance but will wait upwards of a minute for a tape drive to find a video file . . . . maybe with real time protection disabled it will only take 59 seconds though. . . . . plus theres popcorn to make anywayhttps://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gifhttps://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gif

Since I did daily backups to tape I figured if I got a virus I'd just restore to the date before since my backup software keeps each version of each file so I can restore to a specific date.

And the continuous performance of my PC isnt the same as the time it takes to load a movie I want to watch once a week.

Oh, and by the way I just bought a Sony SDX-420C for $305 with free shipping.

Thanks

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Originally Posted by ClickHere2Surf.com

Oh, and by the way I just bought a Sony SDX-420C for $305 with free shipping.

Thanks

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Good 'O' ! :devil: Maybe you'll stop asking me loads of dumb dvd burner questions, when you only ever wanted a new tape drive !!! [sigh] http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/temper.gif :D

I was honestly not sure which I wanted and didnt ever think I could get a better tape drive for only $300, but with a deal like that I couldn't pass.

Plus in less than a year when they have 9.4GB double layer DVDs that'll finally be able to copy a movie without taking out the special features and reducing the quality to make it fit on 4.7GB, so I'll wait for the new DVD writers.

Thanks

Are you planning to open a Blockbuster vidio store or just feel comforted by hording so many movies? I think it's time to take a step back and look at the logic of saving so many movies.
Solution: I once went on an interview to a company which had a large circular tape library accessed by a robotic arm which would continually go around and load tapes for data to store, read, and write.

DownBeachBreeze

My PC is my TV and VCR, I dont use those old black video tapes that are a nightmare to use and not even worth using. I have all my TV recordings on my PC all instantly accessible rather than insert and FF 15 tapes until I find what I want 5 hours later.

I dont have that many movies, its mostly 30 or 60 min TV shows but I record a a fairly high quality because I have a 72" screen so it takes about 1GB per hour of video.

And BTW I dont regret getting this tape drive at all, it works great and is amazingly fast, faster than an average DVD writer (the transfer rate, obviously not the seek time), it runs my scheduled backup every day and I did have to restore a few files a few times and did a full restore when I got my new hard drives.

If you only have one hard drive I suggest adding another high capacity hard drive set as a slave to your primary hard drive.
However, If you have two hard drives I don't think you can add even an external removable drive? Too many devices.
BTW I have an Onstream D130 15/30 GB tape drive form a warranty. The first one fell apart and broke the tape. The new one was different more expensive but I got it for free on warranty. It runs much better. However, 1Safe still does not have Window's XP complient drivers.

DownBeachBreeze


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