On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 11:42:19PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 February 2005 18:42, Tom Simons wrote:
> >Can/should Amanda use an Iomeg REV drive as an output tape?
> >
> >We've got 2 servers both running RedHat AS 3.0, with 35gb & 70gb
> > hard drives on each, and we're intersted in running Amanda on one
> > of the servers to back up both (& more servers to follow).  The
> > "backup" server has a 35gb Iomega REV drive, which RedHat sees as
> > /cdrom2.
> >
> >Has anyone used a REV drive with Amanda?
> 
> I can imagine that it may be possible, with some variation of the 
> FILE: device, and as Jon mentioned, they have a 10 disk changer 
> available which to me, would make it *much* more appealing given a 
> reasonable price for both the drive and the media..

Single drives retail for ~ $350 - $450 depending on type (internal IDE,
external USB, etc.).  Media lists for ~ $50 ea.  The autoloader appears
to list for ~ $2200.  So the hardware is a bit cheaper than a (new)
comparable capacity tape unit, but the media is more expensive.

> Jon (or anyone else with some thoughts here) how would one go about 
> dealing with the fact that the Iomega drive is probably a random 
> access drive, meaning it would need to use the FILE: device, *and* 
> treat it as a robotic changer mechanism to bring the proper disk into 
> the drive proper?
> 
> The first thing would be to investigate and find out if the mtx driver 
> can control the robot.

Assuming mtx can control the beast, it shouldn't be too difficult to
modify chg-zd-mtx to mount and unmount the media. 

> Without the robotics, and just feeding it the disk cartridge by hand, 
> and using the FILE: device, it seems to me that wouldn't be too hard 
> to setup assuming that Tom can build snapshot 
> 2.4.5b1-20041221.tar.gz, obtainable from the amanda.org front page 
> via link near the bottom of the page.

For those of us who haven't been keeping up with the betas, what's the
must have feature in that one?  I've been using 2.4.4p2 with my REV without
complaints.

> Whats the rated read/write speeds on that drive Tom?  For amanda to be 
> useable, it needs to be able to do a more or less normal backup in 
> not more than 3-4 hours total elapsed time.  Can it fill that sized 
> disk in a reasonable time frame?

I'm currently putting about 20GB on there per run in the space of about
3 hours.  Mind, that's going straight to tape and with one really slow
host (which also happens to be the Amanda server) in the mix. 

Iomega claims they're "8x faster than tape", with the fine print qualifying
that as 8x faster than DDS4.  It probably won't beat, say, an LTO-2 for
speed.