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Recently, I received two news releases regarding storage devices that actually grabbed my attention. The first touted a Seagate Technology 72-- GB SCSI hard drive; the second promoted Maxtor Corp.'s new 80-GB IDE drive-now that's some serious capacity out of a single drive.
The staggering growth in drive capacities has raised the bar on server-- storage capacities. If you examine the specs for even the most basic workgroup servers from Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., you'll see they now support upward of 100 GB. The result is workgroup environments with the ability to provide a few hundred gigabytes of storage. So now the issue becomes one of backup-- how do you handle all this data in an environment not traditionally suited to maintaining high-capacity backups? A single-drive solution isn't going to cut it, and an autoloader with the required capacity is usually way too expensive.
Enter Benchmark Tape Systems Corp.'s new Benchmark DLT7 tape autoloader. This baby gives you 560 GB of capacity for a street price of around $3,800, according to distributor Tech Data. A comparable HP DAT DDS-4 autoloader with less than half that capacity sells for around $3,100. I was pleased by the DLT7's performance, capacity and ease of use. This is one of the best values in the autoloader market.
At the Core
As its name suggests, the DLT7 is a seven-cartridge autoloader. You'll find a...