Hi,


I have used/tested all 3 providers.  Up to now best performance was the HP LVD.
Seagate had a lot of time-out problems showing as 84 etc. on our SGI, fixed...
I think we are one of the first to get Seagate's (or any lto) to work over fibre
on an SGI with Netbackup...  Took 3 months or so (immature drivers, firmware
etc)

HP, does not certify (or recommend) their drives to be used over fibre/fibre
bridges, but I was successful with the 3250 LVD.
HP also had a problem that made direct attached servers reboot with the firmware
:)  That was a hard one to find...

IBM's seemed fine, tested on NT.  IBM's also have a neat display etc, can come
handy, easier to figure out what is going on.

Seagate's 1mb/s additional speed claim, I do not think is anything to go by, I
still do not think LTO is mature on all environments, has to be carefully tested
before put on production.  Every single time I installed an LTO drive for the
first time it took me a week to 2-3 months to get it working right.  But again,
we started testing while the technology was not mature + using it on less common
configs.

But performance is definitely better than DLT...  Does anyone have DLT vs LTO
(drive and media) reliability numbers, can not seem to find anything worth while
(e.g. Real user production data, rather than mtbf numbers).

I would not mind getting together and discussing (mail,phone etc) LTO stories
and tests with other implementors.  Let me know if you are interested.

I hope this information helps.

Regards,

Yucel

---------------------------------------------------------
Yucel M. Erbilgic
erbilgic.ym AT pg DOT com
(513) 945-1859