tape vs disk

[Bren Smith]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:30 AM, <mzacht at mac.com> wrote:
> Thinking about switching some AIT tape users to hard drive backups.
> Wondering if anyone out there has done this and your results. Specifically,
> did you ever encounter any read errors which caused the entire file to be
> inaccessible?
>
> I'm concerned with the higher failure rate of SATA drives these days that
> writing to a 1TB drive will create one huge file on a drive. Which in turn
> may come back with -36 errors... bad media. Then what? Unlike tape where you
> just lose one in a bunch of many with this scenario you lose the equivalent
> of multiple tapes in one shot.
>
> I was thinking of going with something like OWC's Voyager and just popping
> drives in as needed.
>
> Thoughts from the community?

We've had good luck with an 8TB OpenSolaris box with qty. 16 500GB and
750GB drives formatted using ZFS. I love this setup, as I can add 1TB
drives or 1.5TB drives, etc. and grow the disk pool as needed. It's
connected to my Retrospect server as an iSCSI connection, and it just
works!

-- 
Bren Smith
bren at lene.com