Amarbir wrote:
Well ,
Nice useful post .I am also going to setup one pc for all of this
1 : Floppy discs 1.44 and 1.2
2 : Tapes "Can you People Direct Us To Some Hardware We Could Buy "
3 : SCSI And SAS
Thats All for Now
Tips:
1) There are USB floppy drives for you laptop owners. If you don't need 5.25" (1.2MB/360KB) or obscure formats from the 1980's, then a single 3.5" (1.44MB/800KB)will do fine. DO NOT write to a 360K disk with a 1.2MB drive if you EVER want to read the data back on any 360KB drives. The higher-density drives only write to half the track width=muffled on reading with 360KB drive's heads. Macs and PCs use a compatible low-level format so you can read Mac disks from the 1980's on a PC, assuming that they can in fact be read. Some drives will have trouble with some disks that are just plain out of alignment. You should have a normal drive for disks written by drives that haven't fallen off a truck, and another that easily lets you adjust calibration to 'unfall' the alignment. Oh, and keep the drive clean!
2) Ugh, you should have been already collecting years ago (sadly) but start with the obvious stuff like Travan or ZIP (100/250/750, beware click-of-death revisions) or LTO (latest drives support LTO-5). Basically, if you don't want to go down that road of buying every storage format mentioned on Wikipedia and the money involved (gonna need several drives of
each format for some of the less reliable), go with what you've seen used by your target audience. Learning to fix obsolete drives is... ugh, a masochist dream - better get paid well to convert their old records!
3a) SCSI is a bad name. There are many, many different connectors (25/50/68/80, centronics/pin arrays/...), electrical specifications (LVD/HVD/..., different terminators needed), protocol variations that some drives shouldn't be on the same cable, overpriced all of the above, and oh, did I mention more revisionism than a DC Comics book? But if you have some specific questions, I can help you find your way.
3b) Think of this as SCSI without all the annoyances caused by having all those physical and electrical variations. One specification to rule them all. It's the total mirror of SCSI! Only one big gotcha I've seen a lot of is stuff like servers/arrays locking you into vendor-approved firmwares+drives, but that's only on the RAID's which you probably shouldn't mess with in the first place. If someone is needing to image individual drives from an array of supposedly-redundant disks, then something is seriously wrong and their data is probably seriously gone! (LOL) Has anyone had problems with drives not reading outside their proprietary arrays? As in not even reading on a non-RAID setup? I won't even get into tools for rebuilding arrays outside the original hardware. That's not normally considered worth knowing. Any sane person would have told you to keep offsite backups... If you're putting that much money into RAID hardware, it makes no sense not to go the last mile. Imagine spending $1m on a house and then skipping the smoke alarms and fire extinguishers. Ouch...
http://www.emaglink.com/MMPC.htmOh wow, that's just the software. Still probably worth it if you're needing something organized to do thousands of tapes at-a-time, and want to be able to use most stuff without all kinds of software/driver crow-barring. Still too much if you don't, though! What kind of price is it? Anyone get a quote?