[KLUG Members] High Capacity Tape Drives

[Adam Tauno Williams]

We are looking at increasing our archiving (tape) capacity, and
evaluating 'Ultrium 2 LTO' (200Gb) vs. AIT-3(100Gb) vs. SDLT.  Was
wondering if anyone had any experience or comments on either one or
another of these classifications of drives?

We've been using 4mm DAT4 (40Gb) drives, but it just isn't enough
capacity anymore.  We've tried tape changes but they don't seem to be
terribly reliable.

I'm leaning towards LTO since the cartridges contain 4kb of static ram
that stores the tape id, usage count, error log, etc... which would be
really nice;  but how does one go about using or accessing that
information? (I've got no idea).

We've got about ~180-200Gb of data to archive.