Topic: Dell TapeDrive

[Steve]

Is anyone using Dell PowerVault tape drives?  Does your tape drive have to be as big as your HD's? I was thinking about using raid5 with 3x18GB SCSI's, but that would require me to have a 60GB tape drive which is somewhat expensive.

Are the PowerVault tape drives very hard to setup and use?  I'm assuming that e-smith supports compression.

Also, do I need a drive with or without a controller?  What is the controller?  I couldn't find any information on Dell's website.

[Rich]

Hi Steve

We use a couple of Dell machines with tape backup :


Dell PowerEdge 2600
PV110T DLT1 VS80 40/80GB int. Adaptec 19160 Card


Dell PowerEdge 2550
Dual embedded Ultra 3 SCSI controllers
 PV100T 20/40GB DDS-4 LVD DAT internal unit

They work fine, although they only operate at anything like sensible speeds (10 MB/s) when you change the blocking factor to 64Kb.

Oh, and we only got the PV100T to work by changing the SCSI setting to "narrow".

Otherwise they work great (i.e. cause no bother). I recommend having a tape big enough to take the whole disk - that way you can do a complete backup every night. The incremental approach requires a degree of organisation that I find difficult to muster. I've found Dell to be much better at cutting the price of these things than at the desktop end. Just tell them you're buying IBM - that usually does the trick.


Rich.

[Steve]

Rich,

What file do I need to look at to configure with the settings?  What type of hard drive configuration are you running in your poweredge 2600?

thanks

[Kelvin]

Steve,

If you are using RAID-5 with 3 drives, you will lose approx. 30% of the total size of the three drives for RAID parity. Therefore in your case, your total online capacity is only approx. 40GB and not 60GB.

Kelvin

[Steve]

Thanks Kelvin.

I knew that!  I wasn't thinking!