Kathy Fischer writes:

Can anyone out there recommend an autoloader (DLT type), or warn against any for use with the toaster?

If it doesn't have to be DLT, the Exabyte Mammoth tapes get excellent performance and are cheaper. I am getting better than 5 Mbytes/sec continuous xfer, which lets me backup 65 Gigs in about 4 hours using dump on the filer. This is to an Exabyte F220 autoloader (10 tapes) running in dumb mode, attached directly to an F720.

Well almost directly; I have a Rancho differential SCSI to single-ended converter mashed in between the Exabyte and the F720. I ordered both the F720 and the Exabyte at the same time and failed to notice that the 720's come with differential SCSI! I sure croaked that filer bad when I connected a plain 68pin to 50pin HD SCSI kluge adapter to it. Kernel fault and core dump.

Supposedly, BudTool works with the Exabyte too, but I may never be able to find that out :-)

On the performance thing: it's important that the filer be able to get the data rate up high enough to prevent the DLT tapes from shoe-shining which brings down their effective xfer rate a lot. I had a DLT4000 drive for a while before I bought the F220 and it shoe-shined a lot when driven from an F330 filer. It only managed to do about as well as the 4mm DAT drive it was temporarily replacing.

I kinda like helical scan technology for that start/stop ability.

Cheers!