Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!wucs1!warren
From: warren@wucs1.wustl.edu (Warren Burnett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: New stuff
Message-ID: <764@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Date: 31 Mar 89 01:53:06 GMT
References: <2017.AA2017@panchax> <1606@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca>
Reply-To: warren@wucs1.UUCP (Warren Burnett)
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 27

In article <1606@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca> king@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca (Stephen King) writes:
>In article <2017.AA2017@panchax> richard@panchax.gryphon.COM (Richard J. Sexton) writes:
>>
>>1) DAT decks.
>.................
>In other words, don't hold your breath. But what about 8mm video? This
>format should also be amenable to HD backup, and ..........

Here at the Wash U. Engineering School, we are using an 8mm Exabyte drive to
back up our mini's (uVaxen and Sun's).  We use standard Sony 8mm 90 minute
video cassettes and get about 2.3 Gbytes on each tape.  

The drive is pretty fast, faster than our 9-track.  It is on the SCSI port 
on one of our Sun 4/280's; I don't see any reason it couldn't be used on 
the SCSI port of an Amiga (with a suitable cable, of course).  It is also
pretty reliable; using the error rate given in their documentation (I don't
remember the exact figure) we calculated that if you use 2 tapes per week,
you could go 63 years and encounter only a single bit error.

As I recal, the drive was pretty expensive, somewhere in the neighborhood
of $5000 to $7000.  This is probably overkill for an Amiga system costing
only a couple of thousnad dollars, but if you are looking for a way to spend
some money and have ALOT of data to back up, this might be what you are
looking for.

				Warren Burnett
				warren@wucs1.wustl.edu