OT: No good info, only responding
> Barry R really liked Ecrix, although
> he's moved on the bigger things (AIT IIRC).
Acck, my ears are burning.
Here's my progression:
QIC - not consumer, no matter what anyone says, just
old. In those days, the only competition other than
mainframe 9 track and 3480 was Exabyte, which had
a horrible history.
DAT - 2GB. When I had 3x600MB o'disk it was fine.
Original DLT in a 7 slot autochanger. Fast if you
could feed it, HORRIBLE if you could not.
DAT 4/8 GB (I think). Just because I needed to read one.
Original Exabyte, to read from an RS6000.
DUAL AIT in specialized enclosure with compression
card. Cost me $22K for 2, ie: 4 drives. Was to backup
300GB. Too pricey, but big and fast.
Then I did a little dance with ECRIXs. Bought about a dozen of
them. Sprinkled them like fairy dust. Too slow, though,
for any backup > 100GB, and when I do one'off backups
by hand, for panic, way too slow. 3-6MB per second.
Restore time was pretty bad too. Very cheap for the
capacity, though.
Now I'm in love with Exabyte Mammoth M2 in EZ17 robotic
enclosure, 7 tapes. $6K for the box. Backup runs between
10 - 25MB per second, depending on compressability. Each
tape holds about 70GB already compressed data, 100-200GB
raw data. Restore runs at about 15-30MB per second
and that is what REALLY counts when you are sweating. I
currently have 8 of them.
