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Signal Ground: Serious Backup – Exabyte M2 and Tandberg SLR 60 [Review]

[ Thanks to Ken
Treis
for this link. ]

“Consumers don’t hear as much about data backup as they used to.
There are many reasons for this: mass storage devices have become
much more reliable; people have turned to secondary hard disks for
data backup; and higher capacity removable drives (not to mention
CD writers) have become commonplace on new systems. But despite
these changes, one thing has remained constant: serious backup is
done on magnetic tapes. In this review, the Signal Ground team
scrutinizes the Exabyte Mammoth-2 and Tandberg SLR 60. Do both of
these SCSI drives pass the Linux challenge? Read on to find
out.”

“Magnetic tape media has been around for a long time. While it’s
obviously not very well suited to random access, it does a good job
storing large pieces of sequential data — like your files. And,
once you’ve made a drive purchase, you’ll find that magnetic tapes
are extremely cost-effective.”

“Both drives use a LVD (Low Voltage Differential) Ultra2 SCSI
interface, but I had no problem using either of them with my old
Adaptec 2940UW card.”

“Another cool feature of both drives is that they do their own
compression. That means that you don’t have to waste your precious
SETI@home cycles compressing archives before writing the tape.”

Complete
Story

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