[ale] Good cheap tape drive? (was Re: [ale] Full filesystembackup to CD-R)

[jknapka at earthlink.net (Joseph A Knapka)]

Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> I got a Seagate Hornet drive (uses the 10/20GB Travan tapes - I think
> TR-5) on SCSI.  It appears to work fine with all the mt and tar
> commands.  One thing I find annoying is that premature end-of-tape
> conditions is unclean and I don't think that hardware compression works
> (you can, of course, use a z in your tar option but I understand that
> that can wreak havoc if your tape gets corrupted).  I think the drive
> cost about $200 and the media costs about $70.

And there's the killer. I have a Travan 8G drive that I never
use, because (a) it's too small, and (b) I can't afford the
media. The cost per gigabyte for DLT is less than half that
of Travan; DAT media is 1/5 the cost of Travan. Wish I could
afford to buy a drive :-P

(But, holy cow, DLT drives are expensive! I just checked
dirtcheapdrives, and they all start over $1K. DAT looks
like a better deal all around, for home/small business
use, anyhow.)

Cheers,

-- Joe

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