Monday, January 20, 2003

Tape drives are the debil

(groans) Did I ever mention how much I despise tape drives? Slow access times, clunky interfaces - both guaranteed to drive me up the wall.

Slow is annoying because during the wait I tend to multi-task, working on other projects at the same time (such as blogging!). The problem is, however, that I'll forget about the tape operation that is iin progress because I'm working on other stuff. So that 10 minutes to recatalog the tape just became 1-2 hours, at which point I remember, and start another process that takes 5 or 10 minutes (rinse-repeat).

And these are only 4.5Gb capacity (uncompressed) 8mm tape drives, which is getting small now. I'm looking forward to getting and installing the Sony DRU-500A DVD writer in another month. The cost per DVD-R is around $4 or $5 (8mm tapes are $12), it'll take me the same effort to backup files to it, but access time for restore is going to be a lot faster (and I can just catalog it with SuperCat). I may bother with the DVD-RW, or may give it a pass (depends on how well it works). I used to backup to CD-RWs until my storage needs regular exceeded 500Mb.

posted by Wuphon's at 10:04 AM