Jean-Francois Malouin wrote:

> I'm not sure what kind of box will have the tape drive but
> it has to be able to sustain 15MBs for a LTO to stream which
> is 3 times more than the DLT7000 you already have.

Ah - forgot to stick the hardware specs in the original mail. It's a
dual CPU AMD Athlon 2000+, with the Amanda holding partition on a RAID-5
array composed of 7 Maxtor Atlas 10k4 drives. Disk timings from hdparm are:-
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.47 seconds =272.34 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.57 seconds = 40.76 MB/sec

Given that, I'm assuming that the IO bandwidth will be more than enough
to run the drive in streaming mode without any trouble, as the backups
run at night when system utilisation is fairly minimal anyway.

> Just curious:
> You say above that HP LTO/Ultrium is "too unreasonable for the 100Gb
> native capacity"...Do you mean unreasonable in terms of $$$ ?

I though I said "not too unreasonable" - I was actually quite favourably
impressed with the cost, compared to SuperDLT. Subject to advice I get,
I actually think I'm most likely to end up going for a 100Gb LTO drive.
The 200Gb ones are quite expensive, as is SuperDLT, and AIT makes me
twitchy as Sony and openness have never really gone together well.
Thanks for the views though - that's 2/2 votes for LTO so far, which is
a good sign :-).

Mike.