On 4 Dec 2009 at 12:51, Doc Shipley wrote:
One of my clients had been doing his nightly backup
on an Iomega
Travan drive, using the software that came with it. I did a restore
test when he came to us, and found that most of his tapes were so worn
there were clear stretches of mylar mid-tape! The Iomega software had
never thrown a single write error.
Not really Iomega's fault.
My gripe in general with most Travan and QIC-40/80 consumer-level
devices. A separate verify pass is necessary, which takes about as
much time as the writing pass, so most users simply never bothered.
And if an error was discovered on the tape, the entire tape had to be
rewritten, a real disincentive to verifying if there ever was one.
An awful lot of data was written in drifting sand as a result.
As much as DDS devices were despised, at least they had read-after-
write.
My memory is faint, but I think there were a few Travan drives wtih
read-after write implemented--perhaps HP?
--Chuck