Brian Tao wrote:
On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, mark wrote:
AFAIK The interleaving thing was born of expediency, for all the backup product vendors: for backing up from slow individual clients to tapes that only work efficiently when streaming.
What are people's experiences with non-streaming performance ofvarious kind of tape drives? Do some mechanisms handle lack of streaming better than others? For example, I would think that a DLT7000 would suffer horribly if you don't feed it data fast enough because it takes a relatively long time to stop the tape, rewind and reposition, and bring the tape back up to speed. A helical-scan drive would be less affected, since the tape speed is very low (and can thus stop/start the tape very quickly). The tape speed difference is something on the order of 100-fold (about 4 m/s for a DLT7000, and 4 cm/s for a Mammoth, IIRC). Have people found helical-scan drives to be much less susceptible to streaming-related performance degradation?
Prior to our current Networker/DLT7000 backup system we had an Epoch/Exabyte system and my feeling is that it was both more reliable and faster, of course we backed up considerably less data then.
On a related note, has anyone any comments on VXA tapes and drives, their web site (http://www.vxatape.com) makes a good argument for them but then again DLT sounded good before I started to use it.
/Michael