On 12 Feb 1997, Jon Ribbens writes:

> Further to my earlier question about tape drives in general, we are
> now considering buying a Colorado Memory Systems Travan T4000S
> internal SCSI 4GB (62MB/min) drive (phew!). Does anybody have any
> experience of these - i.e. will it work with NetBSD 1.1, is it
> reliable, is it a good buy? A friend of mine said that Travan
> devices are unreliable, but there doesn't appear to be much option
> apart from DAT, which is much more expensive.

Buy DAT.  http://www.jemcomp.com has some Conner 4584 DDS-1 jukebox
DAT drives for $359.  We have three here (we paid $399!), one running
hooked to a NetBSD 1.2/i386 machine (BTW, why are you still running
NetBSD 1.1??).

These are reliable (if older) high end network backup type drives.  A
drive includes a 4-tape jukebox mechanism.  If you want to turn it
into a 12-tape jukebox, add $100 for a 12-tape cassette.  This is
emphatically *not* 'consumer', DOS/Windows-oriented technology :-)

If you want DDS-2 (higher speed and capacity, latest generation DAT),
pay $499 for the (refurbished) Conner 4586NP drive from the same place
(we just received two of these yesterday -- too early for me to
comment on how they perform!).

The only issue we have had with these drives is that they definitely
need to be kept cool: an external case with a decent fan is how we
handled that.  We had strange failures after several hours continuous
use when one of the 4584 drives was installed internally in the NetBSD
machine, and the drive seemed rather hot when we opened the machine.

I really really doubt you will regret using DAT instead of DC2000
style minicartridge technology.  As has been pointed out, the tapes
are cheaper by a factor of 3 or 4, too!  Say you need 24 tapes total
over a two year period, costs break down as:

  Drive cost + 24*tape cost = Total cost.

  $500 + 24*$9  = $716  (DAT approach)
  $200 + 24*$35 = $1040 (Travan approach)

Even if we assume $12 per tape for DAT (expensive!) and $30 per tape
for Travan (cheap), the numbers come to $788 (DAT) and $920 (Travan).
And $500 for DAT allows an extra $140 to buy yourself a nice external
case for the DAT drive, so I'm really being as pessimistic as I can be
towards DAT here.  (Apologies for using US$, I'm a Brit even though I'm
now working on US soil!)

Now, which is *really* the more expensive solution? :-)

Jonathan
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