Test results
How we testedâ€"tape drivesOur test server was an Acer Altos 1200; it was equipped with the following:
- Dual Pentium III 1.26GHz processor
- 1GB ECC SDRAM
- Five 18GB (72GB in Raid 5) Seagate Cheetah HDD drives (Ultra 160 SCSI)
- Mylex AcceleRAID 352 (2 channel, 64MB cache) HD controller
- Micorosoft Windows 2000 Server operating system
This is a typical mid-range server that one would most likely use with the tape devices we tested. To really get the best out of the Ultrium 2 drive, for example, you would need to spend thousands on a high-end disk array to get the 30MBps transfer rates that can be achieved using an Ultrium 2 drive.
For our backup software we chose Veritas Backup Exec for Windows NT/2000 Version 9.0, Build 4367. The software was configured to carry out full copies of the data, ignore the archive bit, perform no verify, and use hardware compression if available. During restore the directories concerned were deleted from the server's hard drive and the software configured to overwrite all files.
The data backed up to the units during testing totalled 20,631,422,036 bytes and comprised 71,108 files and 6476 folders. We then restored a smaller folder that totalled 4,207,894,052 bytes and comprised 7144 files and 1004 folders. All times were taken from the Veritas -Activity Monitor"â€"this included rewind times at the end of the operation, for example. The results were tabulated and from the backup times an average transfer speed for each drive was calculated.
We also rated each of the tape back up units in the areas of interoperability, future proofing, return on investment and service.
Interoperability: Software support across the platforms. (eg, Windows)
Futureproofing: With futureproofing we were predominantly concerned with capacity in terms of native and compressed storage capacity. We also looked at the transfer speeds in MBps.
Return on Investment: We looked at the initial purchase price of the unit as well as the cost per GB.
Service: With service we looked at the length of the warranty as well as the types of services offered (eg, on-site exchange, RTB).
6%
1%
