I'd second Frank (Smith)'s idea.

With our 2nd jukebox and LTO drives I'd much prefer to use
a single amanda config rather than the current config, designed
to utilize both drives at the same time (no matter how well it 
is working) of 2 amanda configs, one for local and one for remote
disks, running _concurrently_ on the same processor.

>    Has anyone considered setting up a pool of 2 or more drives, and
> having a master taper process that would assign DLEs to a particular
> drive whenever a drive was available?  It could be round-robin, with
> a little extra logic to do some size leveling.  If you had two drives,
> half of your DLEs (size-wise) would end up on drive 1 and half on
> drive 2.  To restore a given DLE you would only need one of those tapes.