>But i'm interested in the reliability of DLT tapes. How many damaged
>tapes have the members of this list seen in their live?
Dozens. DLTs are high density, but very sensitive to environmentals.
Temperature, pressure, humidity all have a serious impact on DLT performance
and lifetime -- most small shops don't maintain a controlled environment that
supports longterm DLT usage. Drop one or knock it off a desk and the data's
probably gone. They also hold up very poorly to lots of tape positioning
requests (in a non-collocated environment, DLTs don't work well at all).
In most "open systems" environments, I don't recommend using DLT cartridges for
more than 4 months before replacing them. If you look at the total lifecycle
cost of using the DLTs, the 3590s start to look like a good idea very quickly.
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