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Page 7 of 8 Tape Drives Tape drives are by far the best option for write-once-read-rarely and large scale backups. Whilst the tape drives themselves are quite expensive (from $500 to $5000+) the tape media itself represents decent value for money in the dollar per GB stakes. Tape media is widely regarded as extremely reliable, as well as the tape drive hardware, and quite frankly it would want to be, as a 200/400GB LTO-2 tape drive starts at around $2200 inc GST. Thankfully the media is reasonably priced around $45-$50 per cartridge. Currently, tape drives range in storage capacity from 20/40GB up to 400/800GB per tape, depending more or less on how much you’re willing to pay for the drive hardware and tape media.The two values represent the native capacity (uncompressed data) and the maximum compressed capacity (based on 2:1 compression). As many types of data are already highly compressed these days, you will rarely fit anywhere near the full compressed capacity onto a backup tape. When purchasing a tape drive, it is usually not necessary to purchase any additional and costly backup software, as any Microsoft Windows NT/2000 or later operating system has built in backup software that will work with almost any tape backup device, and allow complete or incremental backups as well as allow for spanning across multiple tapes, and scheduled backups.Tape backups are just that, backups, they aren’t widely used in the consumer market for data transfer (between locations) like many of the above methods are. So make sure you take this into account when making your decision. Pros: Reliable, value for money if doing large backups, current technology has very fast transfer rates. Cons: Large setup costs.
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