S159 Cartridge tape

[Bertrand Decouty]

In article <40260 at pyramid.pyramid.com> csg at pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
	[ text deleted]
>While these drives are interesting, they are hardly a panacea. The big problem
>is reliability. The drives are rated at "10,000 hours, 10% duty cycle," which
    ^^^^^^^^^^^
>means that to achieve a 10,000 hour life you cannot use the drive more than 2
>hours and 2 minutes per day. That's a little more than a gigabyte per day. If
>you have more than that, the drive will wear out sooner. Sure enough, when we
>ran the drives continuously, they died consistently in about two months.
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
><csg>

Could you be more precise, please? Is it 10% continuously or not?
Because doing a back-up of 500 MBytes of a local disk on a Sun 3 can take
as long as 1 hour but the same back-up of a *remote* disk take 3 times more!

Which method is the best for big back-up (near a full tape, 1.7 GB for a 90mn
tape): 3 hours continuously or 3 times 1 hour separated by 1 idle hour?
(it is an example).
Is there any people having such an experience of large and long back-up?

It seems to me that many people are interested by Exabyte-like products
but few people really uses it for more than 500 MB back-up, so we have no
idea of real reliability: dump failure, hardware failure...

Thanks for any info.


    ----- Bertrand DECOUTY @ INRIA-IRISA (Centre de Rennes) -----
+------------------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| IRISA - INRIA                |  EMAIL : decouty at irisa.fr                    |
| Campus de Beaulieu           |  UUCP  : {mcvax,inria!}irisa!decouty         |
| F-35042 Rennes Cedex         |          decouty at irisa.UUCP                  |
| FRANCE                       |  BITNET: DECOUTY at FRCICB71                    |
+--------------------------+---+--------------------+-------------------------+
| PHONE : +33  99 36 20 00 | TELEX : 950473 UNIRISA | FAX  : +33  99 38 38 32 |
+--------------------------+------------------------+-------------------------+