[1249] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Re: 8mm tape drive failing; AFS backup was not done
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Krikorian)
Thu Feb 17 05:05:58 1994
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 94 05:05:35 -0500
From: David Krikorian <dkk@MIT.EDU>
To: yandros@MIT.EDU
Cc: sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU, charon-maintainers@MIT.EDU, rtfm-maintainers@MIT.EDU,
sipb-staff@MIT.EDU, sipb-ec@MIT.EDU
All the information I'm providing below is AT LEAST a year out of
date, and some of it is 2 or 3 years out of date.
> How much would a new drive cost?
When we bought the first drives, I believe they cost somewhere from
$3100 to $3500. They have been superceded by newer drives. If
Exabyte still has exclusive rights to sell the Sony mechanism in that
form, these new drives probably cost just as much.less.
(The newer drives have twice the density, and I think have compression
built in, giving several times the effective storage space.)
The DAT drives seem to be very much like the 8mm drives, except:
- they have addressable locations (don't know if we'd get any benefit)
- they are physically smaller
- I think the drives are less than half the cost
- they probably lose a LOT less space to inter-record gaps
(these gaps consume about 1/3 of an Exabyte's space)
but:
- we don't have any others
- they have 1/2 the capacity (1.2/2.4 GB vs. 2.3/4.6 GB *)
* Note: by 1.2/2.4 GB, I mean about 1.2 gigabytes with the original
drives, and about 2.4 gigabytes with the newer, higher-density drives.
For current prices, I'd suggest checking MacWeek, or some similar
Macintosh trade rag. [The high-capacity tape drives are generally
SCSI devices. While Macs have SCSI, PCs usually don't, so they tend
to use parallel-port backup tape drives which aren't compatible with
most of our other computers.]
> Would service be avialable for it? At what cost?
Service is always available, the only questions are "from whom" and
"for how much". I haven't been following how IS does hardware service
these days -- someone who is familiar with it should answer. If we
had bought the original 5 Exabytes from the competing (higher-priced)
vendor, they would have provided service for, I think, 20% of purchase
price per year (at least early on, while the drives were still pretty
new).
DAT's all for now.
(Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I can't let people think I have a
reasonable sense of humor, after all.)
