9.7 Our Picks
Although prices vary widely, buying any tape
drive and tapes is a significant expense. Many people consider that
expense unjustified, and so do not install a tape drive. If you find
yourself thinking that way, we suggest you reconsider. Too often, we
hear from readers who have lost their data. The cost of salvaging or
recreating that data may exceed the cost of a tape drive by orders of
magnitude, assuming that it is possible to recover the data at all.
Catastrophic data loss is a very common cause of small business
failures.
If you store your data on a network server that is properly backed
up, you probably don't need a tape drive on your
desktop PC. If you have a relatively small amount of data and are
willing to rebuild your PC from scratch if the hard drive fails, you
may be safe in backing up to a remote server or using a CD/DVD
writer, removable hard drive, or a similar product. But if you have a
lot of valuable data on your system that is not otherwise backed up,
you need a tape drive. Following are the tape
drives we recommend.
- Travan TR-5 Tape Drive
-
Seagate STT220000-series Travan TR-5.
For backing up small servers and
high-end PCs, Seagate STT220000-series tape drives are a superb
choice when drive cost is more important than tape cost. We consider
the Seagate Travan tape drives to be the most reliable inexpensive
drives available.
Seagate produces multiple variants of this drive, including ATAPI and
SCSI-2 versions, both of which are available as Hornet models (bare
drives) or TapeStor models (bundled with BackupExec software). The
more expensive Travan NS20 models support read-while-write and
hardware compression, while the entry-level Travan 20 models do not.
Otherwise, all use the same basic drive mechanism and have similar
specifications. Barbara uses a SCSI Travan NS20 model on her main
workstation, and typically gets 100 MB/min throughput with hardware
compression enabled. Robert uses a Travan 20 ATAPI model without
hardware compression on his primary test-bed system and gets 85
MB/min. (http://www.seagate.com)
- USB Tape Drive
-
Seagate STT6201U-R Portable 20. If
you need a tape drive that you can carry from machine to
machine—either for backing up or for transferring huge amounts
of data—a USB drive may be the best solution. We confess that
we had reliability concerns about using a tape drive with a USB
interface, but after using it extensively we conclude that the
Seagate Portable 20 is as reliable as SCSI and ATAPI Seagate Travan
drives, which is to say extremely so. At a rated 85 MB/min compressed
throughput (versus 120 MB/min for the ATAPI and SCSI models), the USB
version is a bit slower, but just as reliable. We typically get 60
MB/min throughput with this drive when backing up real-world data.
Seagate also makes a 4/8 GB TR-4 version of this drive, which we have
not tested. If you need a portable tape drive, the Seagate Portable
20 is the one to buy.
Either of the drives above is an excellent choice if drive cost is
more important than tape cost. You can buy one of these drives and
half a dozen $35 tapes and use them to back up a desktop system or
small server adequately. If you back up frequently,
you'll need to replace some or all of the tapes
every year or two, but that's relatively inexpensive
insurance for your data.
But there are situations in which tape cost is much more important
than drive cost, and we suggest you determine carefully whether that
is true for you. If you need many tapes, the difference between $35
tapes and $10 tapes adds up fast, and suddenly an
"expensive" DDS tape drive that
uses $10 tapes starts to look like a real bargain.
You're a good candidate for a DDS tape drive if you
back up daily or more often, if you need to archive data for past
weeks or months, or if you need to back up more data than will fit on
one tape. Here are the DDS tape drives we recommend:
- DDS3 Tape Drive
-
Seagate STD224000-series.
We've used DDS drives from
Hewlett-Packard, Seagate, and Sony, and we think the Seagate
STD224000-series DDS3 drives offer the best combination of price,
performance, reliability, and robustness. This drive stores 12/24 GB,
supports read-while-write and hardware data compression, and has
rated throughput of 132 MB/min compressed. In our testing, we
typically get 110 MB/min or so, which is closer to the rated
performance than many drives we've tested.
Seagate sells the drive itself, called the Scorpion 24, or the
TapeStor DAT 24 bundle that includes the Scorpion 24 and backup
software. At $650 or so, not including the cost of a SCSI-2 host
adapter, the Scorpion 24 is not an inexpensive drive, but then you
need only buy fewer than a dozen $8 DDS3 tapes versus the same number
of $35 Travan TR-5 tapes to recover the additional cost of the drive
relative to a Travan NS20 unit. We use the Seagate TapeStor DAT 24 on
our main server, where it does yeoman service. If you need a fast,
high-capacity tape drive that uses inexpensive tapes for a high-end
desktop PC or a small server, the Seagate STD224000 is the one to
buy.
- DDS4 Tape Drive
-
Seagate STD2401LW-R. If even DDS3
isn't large enough or fast enough, the next step up
is DDS4. DDS4 drives store 20/40 GB on a $17 tape, and are much
faster than DDS3 drives as well. The best DDS4 drive on the market is
the Seagate Scorpion 40, which is also available with backup software
bundled as the TapeStor DAT 40. The Scorpion 40 is rated at 165
MB/min native and 330 MB/min compressed, and in our testing achieves
throughput of just over 300 MB/min on compressible data. At $900 or
so, the Scorpion 40 is definitely not cheap, but its large capacity,
high performance, and use of relatively inexpensive large tapes make
it an ideal drive for backing up workgroup/departmental servers and
high-end workstations. Robert uses a Scorpion 40 tape drive on his
main personal workstation, which has more than 200 GB of Ultra160
SCSI hard disk space. If you need to back up huge amounts of data,
particularly if your backup window is short, we think
you'll be delighted with the Seagate Scorpion 40
tape drive.
Although we're advocates of using tape drives for
backup, we recognize that not everyone needs or can afford a tape
drive. If you're in that position,
you're not completely out of luck.
We've tested several alternatives to tape drives,
including superfloppies, CD writers, DVD writers, removable hard
drives, and so on. Each of them has disadvantages—too
expensive, unreliable media, slow throughput, or small capacity (or
all of those)—but using any of them is better than not backing
up at all. Even backing up to floppy disks is better than nothing.
After considering and testing alternatives, here's
our recommendation:
- Tape Drive Alternative
-
Plextor PlexWriter 40/12/40A CD-RW drive.
The
PlexWriter costs less than $175, uses $0.50 write-once CD-R discs or
$1.00 rewritable CD-RW discs, is nearly as fast as a hard drive,
creates very reliable backups, and is useful for other purposes like
copying audio and data CDs. The major limitation of the PlexWriter is
the 480 MB to 700 MB capacity of its discs, which for many people is
no real limitation at all. If your data fits on one disc, a backup
done simply by dragging your data directory over and dropping it to
the PlexWriter is as reliable and convenient as one done to tape.
In one sense, it's more convenient, because you can
access your backup data directly in any CD drive. We confess that,
being belt-and-suspenders folks, we make CD-R backups of our current
working data in addition to our tape backups of our entire database.
More than once, we've reached for that CD-R backup
to retrieve an accidentally deleted file without having to fire up
the tape drive and restore it.
We recommend buying both a spindle of 100 CD-R discs and a stack of
high-speed CD-RW discs. Do routine daily backups to a CD-RW disc and
then recycle the discs as necessary. For example, if you have 30
CD-RW discs, you won't need to overwrite your daily
backup disc until it's a month old. Once a week or
once a month, pull a full archive set of your data to CD-R and store
it somewhere safe.
For updated recommendations, visit:
- http://www.hardwareguys.com/picks/tape.html
|
Main Menu
|
