[Nottingham] Tape Backup Systems

[David Bean]

On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 14:58 +0100, Michael Simms wrote:
> The question I have these days is - WHY would anyone use a tape drive
> any more!

Compare the sustained transfer rate of a hard disk to a tape. A modern
Tape such as an LTO4 can outperform an equivalent external hard disk.
One issue is that some combinations of RAID arrays, filesystems and file
usage (lots of small files are bad) cannot provide data quick enough to
keep up with the minimum streaming speed of a tape. 

David Bean