Dustin Krysak wrote:> Hi there, I am pricing out a dell 840 (low end file server) that will
> run latest centos.
>
> Can anyone recommend a good tape drive/card combo with centos? The
> drives (to be backed up) in it will be a raid 0 - 500gb.
Avoid all helical scan tape like the plague, including DDS/DAT, AIT,
8mm, etc.
For what you're describing, I'd probably go for a LTO3 (aka Ultrium),
and an appropriate u320wide scsi card (I prefer LSI Logic scsi
cards). LTO3 is 400GB native, 800GB w/ hardware 2:1 compression (I
find my typical file server backups fall about halfway between the two
extremes), and backup around 80MB/second if your disk system is fast enough.
Or, plan B, I'd get a LTO2 (200GB native, 400GB compressed, ~24MB/sec,
1.4GB/min) autoloader that holds 8 tapes... Dell calls this a PowerVault
124T (I've got the HP version, they are all OEM from Quantum)... these
come LTO3 too, but with the autoloader the capacity per tape isn't as
critical.
Linux's built in backup tape support was somewhat funky last time I
messed with it (I've currently got my tape backups on solaris and
windows systems). Hopefully this has improved some, but I experienced
problems with end of tape detection, and multivolume tar backups just
not working right in linux, when they worked fine in Solaris.