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Hardware

Cheap Tape Drives for Linux? 26

Posted by Cliff from the budget-friendly-compatible-hardware dept.
Doug Muth asks: "Does anyone have any suggestions for a specific brand of tape drive I should purchase to use under Linux? SCSI tape drives are expensive (plus they require you to get a SCSI adapeter), so I've been looking at some IDE TR-4 tape drives. However, according Red Hat's Hardware Compatibility List, while IDE tape drives are "compatible", Red Hat does not support them." Anyone willing to pass along some helpful suggestions and/or more informaiton on the Red Hat/TR-4 issue?
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Cheap Tape Drives for Linux? More

Cheap Tape Drives for Linux?

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  • DDS-2 SCSI drives will hold 4 gigs (8 compressed) and are very reliable. I have a pair of them at home, and they're not that expensive, by my standards. You can get them brand new off Pricewatch for about $150 or so now, and I've seen them at swap meets for about $100. Onsale had (perhaps still has?) Aiwa DDS-2 drives for %75. A SCSI card for these things shouldn't run you too much -- you don't need anything too fancy to drive them. I've got mine connected to an old Adaptec 1521.

    I really recommend SCSI for backups, mostly because everything supports it and it's pretty much foolproof. It really isn't all that expensive either.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Don't forget about reliability. Quote from one of our top marketing people (I work for STK, we own the tape market on the high end) "It used to be that all unix systems, SUN, HP, SGI, etc came with Exabyte 8mm tape drives, and it was great, you could do backs all day any time no problem. You never could read the tapes backs, but at least you could check the little box that said you had a backup." (Exabyte has improved since then, and since he is in marketing he was stretching the truth a little) His point was that backups are worthless if you can't read them back. Some of those older tape drives wrote tapes that could only be read on the drive that wrote them (as they got older the heads went out of allignement), and then you were screwed if you had a failure.

    That said, SCSI is not that expensive, and scsi drives have a better chance of working. Just buy a scsi adaptor. Soon you will be like me and refuse to touch IDE again... :)

    I too am looking for a good backup. Problem is backups are not easy. I want to backup /home which will soon move to a 9 gig disk, or even bigger. (Amanda isn't happy about dealing with partitions bigger then the tape - not saying amanda is the best way to backup), I really want to backup some macs over my network, and nothing deals with that.

  • I know the driver's beta, and the drives are cheap, but there is an Onstream 30/50G tape driver for Linux [onstream.com].

    That said, I might note that DAT drives get tweeky after a while because of their mechanical complexity. (Think VCR, but tiny.) 4mm tapes are cheap, used drives can be a bargain, but don't bet the farm on one. Don't even use it until you get a cleaning tape! (I got mine at the University Bookstore in Seattle.)

    QIC/Travan drives are way cheap, moderately reliable, Linux-supported but even the IDE ones are quite slow.

  • I recently purchased an AIWA QIC tape drive from www.compgeeks.com; it's listed on there for $45 bucks and is IDE based. It lists as being able to read/write to 4GB/8GB compressed tapes which is what I use right now for my LAN at home. Fully Linux supported; and seems to be working fine for me although I've only had it a couple of weeks. Might not be the best solution but it's certainly cheap.
  • Whenever I recommend a tape drive, it's SCSI DAT all the way. I will let the client know of the cheaper models and then I explain the reliability factor. The whole subject really boils down to this: If you attempt a restore using a cheap drive and it fails, what is the additional price you've just paid? Now that said, let's look at the usage. If this is for business, buy the most reliable tape drive you can afford, if it's for home and you don't care if you lose your 8GB mp3 collection by all means purchase a cheap drive. But then if you don't care about lost data, why are you backing it up? -Pete
  • I have several Linux and BSD boxes I goof around with at work and one of the big holdups I face with integrating them into the department mainstream is network backups.

    Does anyone have any recommendations for centralized network backup software? How about backing up something securely (i.e. outside the firewall, in the DMZ)over the network?
  • After about a year of searching for a cheap tape, I got the above, which works flawlessly with Red Hat (5.1).

    It is actually a 2.5GB, and the 5GB is after compression.

    I got it faily cheap (700 Saudi Riyals March 1999 ~ 187$). I saw it cheaper on some internet sites (can't remember which, but try www.shopper.com [shopper.com]).

    Worked straight out the box on the first try. Did not need to do any kernel recompilation, nor download any drivers...

    The only drawback so far, is that it seems the media is a bit hard to find (at times) in the local market (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

    Good luck.

  • I have been looking for reliable network backup hardware and software for a while as well. The problem is my main box is Linux with ~40G in Disk, so I would want to put a drive there, but I also have 2 Windoze boxen, 1 old PowerMac and 8 other linux boxes that I need to be able to back up to the same drive. Because it's near 100G total, I have accepted that I'll have to fork over $5k for a SCSI tape drive, but I need some intelligent software to backup and restore with. Something that likes to work in Linux, and can also restore an NT system from just a floppy or 3 is what I need. It's pointless if I have to re-install the whole OS to reload the backup.
    Is there any cross platform software that is more intelligent than just tar/dump and can be used to recover from a total drive crash (no/minimal OS)?
    Duplicating files between boxes and archiving off critical files to DVD-RAM is sooooooo slow.
  • IDE hard drive space is getting cheaper all the time (i.e. you get more Mb for the same 100+ dollars), and I suspect reliability is at least as good as,if not much better than, tape drives. (which would you want to let a kid with a fridge magnet get near, a tape cartridge or a sealed in metal hard drive?) Also, if your main hard drive crashes, your backup is on something that (if you set it up right)is bootable and can substitute for it.

  • Avoid Sony Superstation drives at all costs. I found out the hard way that they are not Linux compatible at all. I've been using an HP Colorado (7 gigs uncompressed) without problems. I don't know that it qualifies as "cheap", but maybe one of the smaller HP's will do the job for you.
  • Do all of the HP Colorado family have drivers for Linux? A previous poster mentionned that the 5GB version worked right out of the box. What about the 8 or 14GB?

    K.
  • i dare you to try and erase a DAT. we use them extensivly for both audio recording and system backups. DATs tend not to fail if treated properly. that just means that, as with any magtape, you need to run a cleaning tape once in a while to remove stale magnetic particals from the heads.

    as far as the FUD relating to magnetism, we have a system who's drive is less than a foot from the voice coil of a 22" speaker. aside from the occasional rattle when playing quake at full blast, the machine works fine. granted that it is a win2k box i don't much care about, but it's been in that location for some weeks without the drive suddenly going blank.

    there's a huge difference between being a foot away from a huge magnet and being 1 micron away from a r/w head (as in a hard drive or dat).

    also, don't forget that DATs are digital. that means a value n 0. given n is a proper value, you can have a lot of varience from the first 0 to the second 0 and it will still read a proper value of 0. a little stray magnatisim wont kill your data.

    this is why analog tapes suck, and DAT is the standard.

  • Don't do it! (Score:3)

    by shario ( 109443 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @12:42PM (#1465817)
    I have one word for you: Don't. A running disk drive backup is only good for deletion accidents and broken disk drives, but what if you have

    • a power surge (burns both drives!)
    • an earthquake
    • a fire
    • a kernel level messup making both filesystems unusable
    • a rm -rf / when disk is mounted?

    Having the backups up and running is of course good, but also means that you can't store older backups nor have them off-site which makes a backup system quite worthless, IMHO. But you were looking for cheap :)

  • I use Amanda, it's quite easy to setup, uses tar or dump to make the backups. It can do +2G backups, and it has sort of rotation management. I have opened the few necessary ports from our FW so that the backups can travel through.

    I just wish there was a way to implement grandfather-father-child type of multi-level backup on Amanda. Anyone?

    You can find the source at www.amanda.org [amanda.org], and Red Hat contrib dir in RPM format.

  • Expensive intially can save untold cost later. I bought my Sony DDS3 drive back when they were twice what they are now, and it's been worth every penny. Come to think of it, that drive is the single most expensive computer component I've ever bought; it was money well spent. I've had to restore from tapes as much as 6 months old: no errors, no problems. The QIC80 drives I used to use were not that reliable. Travan etc. is pretty much QIC80 on steriods.

    The only problem I have with it is that it's internal compression is about equivalent to gzip -1; I like better. A reasonably fast machine, the alternative compression program of your choice, and the buffer program [ic.ac.uk] can solve that problem.

    Also, don't buy the "new" Adaptec 2940UWPro (the one that can drive all the connectors at once) SCSI controller to hook your new drive to, it doesn't speak to Sony tapes, and Adaptec's response is: "We know. Too bad." Excretus Est Ex Altitudine
  • Once you start adding a few tapes, DDS-2 is cheaper than Travan. The break-even is somewhere around 10 tapes. Plus the last time I looked you couldn't clean the Travan drives, while the DDS-2 can be cleaned with a cleaning cartridge.

    Current prices from CDW
    Sony SDT-7200/BM DDS-2 drive $440
    10 DDS-2 tapes $9-10 ea $100 total $540

    Seagate TR-4 Travan drive $240
    10 TR-4 tapes $31-32 ea $320 total $560

  • Re:Just don't get an Eagle TR-4i (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sounds to me like it is one of these things:

    - Heat failure (inside the computer it is slightly hotter than outside, a very near failure component will be much more sensitive to temperature).

    - Power/IDE cables aren't too good (try out new ones).

    - Bad solder joint on the PCB on the Tape Drive (perhaps even at the IDE and/or power connectors)

    - Or... least likely, it is being caused by stress on the drive from being in the drive bay (ie. bending it enough something sorta shorts or the heads/mechanisms are slightly out of alignment).

    - Another thing, I just thought of, is that if you are leaving it hanging, the only ground connection to the drive is through its cables. Check if the ground from the drives ground pins (on the power/IDE connector) is perfectly continuous with the case.
  • Do you have a link for a $150 DDS-2 drive? I can't find them on Pricewatch. I found refurbished ones for $255, but certainly not new ones for $150.

    TIA,

    Tony
  • 1. Go with SCSI.

    2. Run a cleaning tape at least weekly. I run one everytime I use my drive, maybe that's why it still works fine after 5 years.

    3. Check your backups to make sure they worked.

    4. Figure in the cost of the media as at least as important as the drive itself. Those cheap looking IDE QIC drives have cartridges that not only don't hold much but cost a fortune as well. DAT is _really_ cheap media and holds a lot. You don't have to worry about getting a few extra tapes since it will only cost $20.

    5. Since you should go with SCSI anyway, get an external drive. It's very handy to have the capability of taking the drive over to a new machine or a friend's house.

    6. It's just plain easier to do incremental backups to another disk, then back up the disk at your convenience. This applies for home use only.

    7. Get a data grade fire safe. Those paper grade safes don't help media at all. APStech.com sells a small one for $140.

    8. Separate what data you have that is static from that which changes/is important onto different file systems. Backups are lots easier and faster if you don't back up your MP3 collection daily.

    My setup: I back up any file that has changed in the last half hour to a separate disk, then back up /home every 12 hours to another separate disk. Once a week I back up the whole computer and every once in a while I back up my useless but fun files. I haven't lost any data in a very long time. I also use an 'rm' script that copies files to $HOME/.trashcan so I have to run my 'dump' script to actually remove them.
  • we've got an ide travan drive (Seagate STT8000A (which is really a conner i think)) at work and it gives us trouble all the time. ok, i shouldnt really say that. i mean, the problems could be related to the software we use with it (afbackup, evil in its own special way), but we've also run into problems while just tar'ing to it directly. it could be related to the kernel (2.2.6) i suppose but i dont remember any pressing bugs being brought up since that release. also, mt(1) doesnt seem to like it much but again that isnt necessarily attributed to the drive itself either.

    not to mention its other weeknesses, mainly 1) its slow and 2) its loud and obnoxious (if only the server didnt reside 5 feet from my desk!).

    personally, if it were up to me, the thing would be in the dumpster and we'd have a shiney new scsi dds-3 drive. *sigh*

    --Siva

    Keyboard not found.
  • I have the 14GB and you don't need any drivers. Just compile support into the kernel or "insmod ide-tape" and you're ready to go.
  • Um..
    Actually, my experience has been about the same..
    Backups are worth the money if you need them, and the cheaper "consumer" QIC drives have given me fits, but the DDS drives I've used have never failed me..
    Of course, YMMV..
  • Check if the ground from the drives ground pins (on the power/IDE connector) is perfectly continuous with the case.

    Hey, yeah. I had that exact problem long ago with big SCSI 1/4" drive (an Archive Scorpion i think). The thing would only work setting on top of the computer, but not when bolted in. It didn't like the case ground.

    Think I disconnected a ground strap in the drive to make it work.

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