🚀 go-pugleaf

A while ago I posted this same question and from the responses and
my own research learned the following:

1) Many more people have Exabyte than DAT.  I did not get a
single response from someone who actually uses a DAT drive.

2) Exabyte's error checking alogorithm is supposed to be significantly
better.

3) DAT drives have very fast seek times, but who cares for backups.

4) Exabyte distributors tend to market for only one brand of computer.
Some of the DAT drives that I've gotten info on work with a truckload
of different computers, Suns, DEC, HP, IBM, Apple.  As far as I can
tell this is another uninteresting difference since neither of them
should get moved around a lot.

5) Exabyte hardware tends to break a fair amount, but at least
they tell you there is a problem.  From the responses:
"I've had several of them break: doors jamming, unable to read/write
(they give you errors, don't worry), the little green light burning
out.... I've only had about 10 tapes fail so far in the past 18 months
[ out of roughly 900 ].  Most of these tapes got stuck in the tape
drives because the drives are so cheap."
"(Our Exabyte) drives have a hard time living on the SCSI bus with
other peripherals. They seem to hang sometimes, forcing a reboot."

6) Nobody's saying (knows?) anything about the reliability of DAT
hardware.

The final upshot was that we are getting an Exabyte.

In total, I received 9 responses and 6 requests for a summary.

The responses were from:
Ted Lemon, Gregg Townsend, Tom Slezak, Paul A. Sustman, Art Hays,
Henry Clark, John Richardson, Bill Heiser, and Joe Pruett (hi, Joey :-)

Thanks again!

Nathan Wilson
Teleos Research
nathan%teleos.com@ai.sri.com

P.S. I also received one advertisement from Peter H. Berens of Apunix.
I didn't respond directly to this note because I consider it to be a
violation of the rules of the internet.