Finally nearing the time to drop some coin on hardware. One of the first things on the list is an LTO6 tape drive for an offline media archive and also for backup use.
I am wondering if there is any reason to choose one maker (ie IBM vs Quantum vs HP) or model over another. About the only things i'm pretty set in is buying new (not refurbished), preferring external case if about the same price (more portable to swap between other machines/plan to use it on more than one), and almost assuredly will be SAS based. Other than that I was just looking at prices... are they all the same? What questions should I ask to choose one over another? Who has objective information since I don't trust most salespeople?
I see very little discussion of tape drives on these boards - if someone can suggest another forum with more tape drive users to post in to ask i'm all ears, i'm just not sure where else to ask.
EDIT/PS: I guess one possible question is should they all work on Mac equally well? That's not critical now (main use will be Windows and Linux) but it's a plus if they can. Any idea about FreeBSD or is that same as Linux compatibility?
I am wondering if there is any reason to choose one maker (ie IBM vs Quantum vs HP) or model over another. About the only things i'm pretty set in is buying new (not refurbished), preferring external case if about the same price (more portable to swap between other machines/plan to use it on more than one), and almost assuredly will be SAS based. Other than that I was just looking at prices... are they all the same? What questions should I ask to choose one over another? Who has objective information since I don't trust most salespeople?
I see very little discussion of tape drives on these boards - if someone can suggest another forum with more tape drive users to post in to ask i'm all ears, i'm just not sure where else to ask.
EDIT/PS: I guess one possible question is should they all work on Mac equally well? That's not critical now (main use will be Windows and Linux) but it's a plus if they can. Any idea about FreeBSD or is that same as Linux compatibility?