Your good neighbor
who's also a computer
consultant!
Saturday 22 November 2008
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Your good neighbor |
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Saturday 22 November 2008
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From The Naked PC issue #5.05... 
Tape Backup: Reliability Is What Countsby Al GordonFebruary 28, 2002 I have been testing the Sony SDX-D400C AIT-1 tape drive for the
past month, and the experience has been a little boring. That is
a HUGE complement for a backup device. You may want your multimedia devices to give you kick-butt sound, for example, or for a video card to dazzle you with its resolution. But you don't want glitz from tape backup. If a tape device calls attention to itself, the reason almost always is trouble: The backup failed. The tape is out of space. There was a communications error. Backup hardware should be reliable, efficient, and invisible. The Sony was. Each night, when Retrospect Backup launched its automated backup,
the Sony quietly whirred to life, performed the backup, and shut
down smoothly. In "real world" testing, it provided sustained
transfer rates of 120 MB/minute or better, among the highest I
have seen for a backup tape. Seek times--the time it takes the drive to find the spot on the tape where data is located--also were quick. Not only does that help with incremental backups, but it greatly speeds up restores. This performance appears to be the result of a first class tape drive mechanism, as one would expect from a Sony product. Equally important, this was the first tape drive I've tested that did not report an error or fail to complete a backup or restore. No glitches. Both Dantz Retrospect and Stomp/Veritas BackUp MyPC (see my other article in this issue) worked well with the drive. To help you migrate from other tape backup systems, Sony bundles NovaStor TapeCopy software with the drive kits for transferring data from your old tapes to the new. The only problems in the test were purely self-inflicted. Sony's
drive is in the tidy 3-1/2" format, which makes it easy to fit
into an internal drive bay. Internal drives, thus, are the
preferred choice. However, I decided that I didn't want to open
up my PC to fit a test unit and asked for an external device.
Alas my existing SCSI card's external connector only supported 20
MBps speeds while the Sony uses 40 MBps. Happily, the folks at
Adaptec were kind enough to provide 19160, 29160, and 39160 cards
for me to get this sorted out. The 39160 ultimately provided the
right combination of internal and external speeds for my system. So much for my grand design of not opening the PC, however. The Sony is not, mind you, a personal backup solution. The internal version runs just under $1,000 and the external is over $1,200. The device is aimed at business and network users who need to protect vital data. It comes as single-drive packages for smaller businesses and workgroups as well as in multi-drive "libraries." AIT--"Advanced Intelligent Tape"--is Sony's successor to DDS digital tape. DDS-4, the fourth generation of the format, will be the last. Sony has been selling AIT-1 and AIT-2 drives and recently unveiled AIT-3 products. In the tape world, each generation means essentially that they have figured out now to squeeze more data on the tape. Standard practice also is that new generations are backward compatible for reading--in other words, they can retrieve data from your old tapes. What all of this means to you is that as each generation rolls out, the price of earlier versions drops. Sony cut AIT-1 drive prices by about $250 in February, and street prices likely will drop more as AIT-3 makes it way onto the market. Thus, the AIT-1 drive will have the assurance of both backward read compatibility and the Sony brand name to protect your investment. You can reach Al Gordon at:
TNPC Hot Tips:
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© 2000-2005 by Dan Butler.
All Rights Reserved.
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