USB Tape drives

[Michael Scully]

Carl:

	Only issue with hard drives is that they should be spun up once a year or so.

	Of course as cheap as flash units are, if you needed something stored for several years time, a memory stick of comparable size to a DAT 72 tape (which holds 36GB natively) is probably under $50.

	I actually have a good friend who is an I/T executive at Iron Mountain, so if you can't find out that answer from other channels, let me know off the list.

MS

On May 31, 2011, at 3:50 PM, Carl G. Riches wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 31 May 2011, Michael Scully wrote:
> 
>> Jackson:
>> 
>> 	Unless you need to exchange data with other tape drives, I'd SERIOUSLY forget about tapes.  When you can get USB attached 500 GB hard drives for $59.99 at any WalMart, why would you want tape?
>> 
>> 	You can reformat the hard drives with ext3 partitions and write to them direct.  Most of the tape backup utilities will support USB hard drives as well.
>> 
>> 	But when I last had a customer with an external drive like that (on a 1U rack server), it did just become /dev/st0.
>> 
> 
> Does Iron Mountain now accept disks for secure off-site media storage?
> 
> Carl G. Riches
> IT Manager
> Department of Biostatistics
> Box 357232                      voice:     206-616-2725
> University of Washington        fax:       206-543-3286
> Seattle, WA  98195-7232         internet:  cgr at u.washington.edu