8mm vs. 4mm (DAT)

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2 total messages Started by Thomas J. Baker Tue, 15 Sep 1992 18:12

#575

Author: Thomas J. Baker
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 18:12

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Anyone with any experiences in this area?  I have the opportunity to either
buy a used 2 year old Exabyte 8200 8mm or to wait a few more months and buy
a new 4mm DAT for the same ~$1000 price.  I've compared them (I had both
the Exabyte in question and a DEC TLZ04 bolted to my color turbo) and they
are pretty similiar in performance.  The Exabyte was about 10 minutes quicker
in backing up about 700MB but there are more DAT drives on campus than 8mm.

Any experience would be greately appreciated.

tjb

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| Thomas Baker        Director of the New Hampshire NeXT User Group | 
| P.O. Box 213           Internet/NeXTmail: tjb@strangeways.unh.edu |
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Re: 8mm vs. 4mm (DAT)

#583

Author: Lawrence Miller
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 22:11

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In article <1992Sep15.181239.740@strangeways.unh.edu>  
tjb@strangeways.unh.edu (Thomas J. Baker) writes:
> Anyone with any experiences in this area?  I have the opportunity to  
either
> buy a used 2 year old Exabyte 8200 8mm or to wait a few more months and  
buy
> a new 4mm DAT for the same ~$1000 price.  I've compared them (I had both
> the Exabyte in question and a DEC TLZ04 bolted to my color turbo) and  
they
> are pretty similiar in performance.  The Exabyte was about 10 minutes  
quicker
> in backing up about 700MB but there are more DAT drives on campus than  
8mm.

I work on an experiment that uses both 8mm and (starting recently)
4mm tape drives on SGI machines.  The 8mm drives tend to be slightly
faster than the 4mm drives.  However, they are less reliable, and
are slower at loading tapes than the 4mm drives (at least, the ones
we use).  Also, we have been able to more reliably use the entire
capacity of the 4mm tapes (often the 8mm tapes run out before 2GB.  You
may not run into this problem if you are just doing backups).
[btw, we use archive python 4mm drives, not DEC's]

Overall, I'd say that the 4mm drive is superior.

Lawrence Miller
High Energy Physics
The University of Chicago

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