Hello!

> So, anyone have suggestions on external changer devices, 8 tape capacity?  
> Any brands/model families you would particularly recommend, or would 
> recommend we -avoid-?  

I vote for LTO (or LTO-2) too. In addition of the merits already listed 
by Alexander, it is worth mentioning that the hardware compression 
algorithm of LTO drives seems to be extremely efficient. I've seen as 
much as 440 GB of data being put on a 200 GB tape here, whereas my 
earlier DLT drive was rarely able to put more than 60 GB on 40 GB tape 
while backing up the same servers. I know that most folks recommend 
against using hardware compression with Amanda, but sometimes it does 
have its merits.

As for brands or devices to avoid, I'd like to list an HP 818 DLT 
autoloader that we used to have. It's tape drive needed replacement 
after we had had it 1 year. This was done under warranty. Then the 
drive needed replacement again after 6 months, but the price of 
replacement was almost 2/3 of the price of entire autoloader. So we 
decided to buy an IBM 3582 LTO2 library. We've had it for a year now, 
and once we got it set up correctly it has given us no further 
problems. I must say, though, that we are not using this library with 
Amanda. Our Amanda setup is still using single DDS-3 drive ;-)
--
Toomas Aas | toomas.aas AT raad.tartu DOT ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/
* Work is for people who don't know how to fish.