Hi,

I am considering replacement for my Amanda server, the guy has been in
production for about 6 years now and I want to be ready for the time
when the tape drive will die.

We currently use SLR100, wich is fine, very little tape failure, but
tapes are expensive, a 50 GB (native) 100 GB (compressed) tape is the
price of a 250 GB hard disk. The tape drive itself cost twice the
price of the server at that time.

So we are considering vtapes, but I would like to have hard disk
physical rotation, the same way we have tape rotation --and it is
manual changing of the tape every day.

The only answer I don't have concernes the hardware to use for disk
hot plug mounting and unmounting (on the software side,I now thatthe
disk can be disconnected from the operating system before they are
physically removed from the machine). Normal hot swap bay for hard
disk are not designed for daily use, they are designed for maintenance
only, and would break soon if I swaped the disk every day.

Could anyone advise on some disk tray solution that is stong and
reliable and will handle a lot of manipulation. idealy I wouldbe
looking at one tray bay and 5 or 6 trays for the disks.

best regards,

Olivier