Steve,
Let me just say that AIT-5 drives saved me from getting
an ulcer. (I had bought AIT-4 drives after buying AIT-3
drives without thinking/knowing about their incompatibilities.)
This caused me some nightmares during restores because of a
non-standard configuration I had. I've had the AIT-5 drives for
7 or 8 months. They've worked flawlessly with AIT-4 and AIT-3
media. AIT-5 media is no more expensive than either of the
lower-numbered. They're quite fast. I'm running 7.2.2 server
on Linux. The only anomalous piece is the estimate of
percentages of the tapes used. I call them AIT-4 drives.
We have two 126-slot libraries with 2 drives in each. A full backup
backs up about 70 Tb of data. We run daily/weekly/monthly
backups. We have 90 clients.
We haven't had a single problem with AIT-3 or AIT-4 tapes.
On our Qualstar libraries, we needed a new ROM. I bought the
drives pre-sledded from Qualstar and the cost was very much
higher than from other vendors. Qualstar claims some sort of value
added, but I actually have no idea if that's true. In this case, I
wanted the drives and didn't want to take a chance. In this case,
I think my decision was rewarded.
We get between 550 and 800 Gb per tape (AIT-5),
250 to 500 (AIT-4)
We haven't had a failure yet.
Obviously, others may have a different take,
but for me it's been great. I've got colleagues who
were led down the garden path with SAIT.
Matt Temple
Steve Barber wrote:
I'm about to upgrade our AIT-4 drives to AIT-5s. I don't see much
in the archives about AIT-5 experiences, other than a few cleaning
and scsi bus issues which sound like normal problems we've already
solved with AIT-4 drives. So I have a couple of questions:
1. I'm currently running NW 7.2.x ("7.2.Build.494" on Solaris),
which does not seem to know about AIT-5 drives. When was AIT-5
support introduced? Any reason I can't just continue to list
them as AIT-4 drives for Networker purposes, bearing in mind that
the size estimates would be wrong? I don't do WORM or anything
special like that. I am leery of upgrading after hearing all the
stories on this list.
2. Are the backwards compatibility issues truly gone with these drives?
Can I let them continue to use the old media with no worries, and just
phase in AIT-5 media as needed? Any real-world experiences here?
Thanks,
Steve
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=============================================================
Matthew Temple Tel: 617/632-2597
Director, Research Computing Fax: 617/582-7820
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute mht AT research.dfci.harvard DOT edu
44 Binney Street, LG300/300 http://research.dfci.harvard.edu
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