Chuck Guzis wrote:
There was a lot of junk in the way of tape drives out
at the time.
We wouldn't endorse any kind of tape that (a) didn't use a standard
SCSI interface and command set (b) didn't perform read-after-write
verification. 4mm DAT barely qualified, but we cautioned against it
as being not-quite-ready-for-serious-use.
Indeed - I used to use DAT quite a lot; I admit to getting sucked in by the
small cartridge size. Eventually I got sick of the problems - it wasn't just
bad tapes, but the drives themselves seemed to fail at a pretty high rate.
I switched over to DLT quite a few years ago - and whilst it's not quite been
error-free, results have seemed a lot better than any of the competition
(floppies, other tape technologies, optical media etc.).
(OT: Just recently I've started mainly using off-line hard disk storage,
though - it's cheap enough now that I can afford to keep copies of data spread
over several drives and at a couple of different locations)
Funny to think that the primary storage might eventually be solid-state, and
it'll be the venerable hard disk that's solely used as a backup device!
cheers
Jules