I've been thinking of buying an LTO2 drive as backup for projects and things. It's seems worthwhile as it gives me 400GB and the tapes have a longer shelf life than a standard HDD(Yes I know the carts cost more than a cheap HDD). I know I'll need a SCSI or SAS card, but what I don't know is what to look for when buying a second hand drive, whether the drive works natively with Windows 7(if not what software should I buy) and if there is any other details I need to know.
For a while I was also looking at tape drives as backup as my work uses LTO4. The tapes are fairly affordable but its the drive itself that is going to cost mucho $$$. Even an older standard like LTO2 right now I'm seeing on eBay for $200-$300, for that kind of money you're better off getting three or four 2TB WD greens and just keeping them in a safe or something which is what I ended up doing. Every month I'll pull out the disks from their safe spot, do an incremental backup of my server using a $25 SATA dock then put the disks away again. If the disks are only used for a couple hours once a month you won't have any problems with shelf life, not to mention backup up to SATA is quite a bit quicker over SATA compared to the 40MB/s theoretical of LTO2.
400gb? Uh, no.
Since there is no way you will get 2:1 compression ratio on everything you own, stick with the native capacity which is 200gb.
I can agree though that the drives are expensive as hell. I'm searching for the later LTO3 drives which are 400gb native and they are expensive as hell. Still, [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNa_D1HIjww]it's nice to have 24tb of storage available.[/url]
However OP, I do have an LTO2 drive I'm willing to trade for either an LTO3 drive or a quantity of LTO3 tapes, used or new.
I thought tapes were really unreliable?
I'm using a 250Mb Zip drive for my web server backups :v:
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