RE: Benchmark DLT1?

[John Stockard <john.stockard@vertsys.com>]

> Not quite so simple...
> 
> Benchmark (the company) is an "alternative manufacturer" of the DLT
> drive format developed by DEC and until recently, available only from
> Quantum (though, of course, other people slapped their names on the
> box).  They call their product "DLT1".
> 
> DLT1 is a 40G (real) DLT format for a price which is shockingly lower
> than Quantum-based DLT IV format drives.  I think Kit (and I, and
> probably a whole lot of other people) are looking for Real World
> Experience with something that sounds too good to be true.  I think we
> all agree the Quantum DLT is a good (but pricy) product, some people I
> know go as far as to say it is the tape drive to which all others
> aspire.  The question is, is the DLT1 as good, or is it a cheap
> knock-off.  After all, if it is not as reliable as a real DLT, I'd
> rather use cheaper DDS media and budget for a new tape drive every
> year or so, than have a DLT drive eating $100 tapes...

We have two drives here (on Windows 2000 servers, alas) that claim to be
"DLT1" tape drives.

One drive announces itself to the SCSI bus as being a "Benchmrk DLT1".  This
drive came in a Dell PowerEdge 2400 server (I think Dell calls the tape
drive a "Dell PowerVault 110T DLT1").  

We recently purchased another drive from another source that claims to be a
DLT1 drive, but announces itself on the SCSI bus as "Quantum DLT7000".
Hmmm....
This drive is from Overland Data, Inc. (http://www.overlanddata.com/).  The
outside of the tape drive even says "DLT1" on it, but I have my doubts that
it's really a DLT1 drive...I would wager that it's really a DLT7000 drive
(35/70 GB capacity) instead of a DLT1 drive (40/80 GB capacity), even though
it has the motorized tape eject feature like the real Benchmark DLT1 drive
(as opposed to the big manual eject lever found on DLT4000/7000/8000
drives).

In any case, these drives have been *very* reliable, once we worked around
the bugs in Veritas Backup Exec 8.5.  The drives have never eaten any tapes,
and are very fast.  The only snag I'm currently having is with the Overland
Data "DLT1" drive -- if I put a DLT tape in the drive that was written in
our DLT4000 drive, the "DLT1" drive considers it to be read-only.  This
makes it rather difficult to erase and reformat...

Unfortunately, I have not had a chance to use any of these drives under
OpenBSD.  As much as I would love to run OpenBSD on these servers, we are a
Microsoft-oriented software development shop.  The developers here would be
cranky if they couldn't run Microsoft SQL Server on these computers.  :(

I would trust a DLT1 drive (or a DLT drive of any flavor) over a DAT DDS
drive any day of the week.

Just my 2 cents.  :)

As a related item, HP has some new tape drives (the HP Ultrium 215 and
Ultrium 230) that use standard DLTtape IV cartridges, but hold 100/200 GB
per tape:
http://www.products.storage.hp.com/eprise/main/storage/DisplayPages/ultrium.
htm.  I'm sure they cost a pretty penny, though...