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Onstream is supposed to have a 70Gig Compressed/35 Gig Uncompressed unit out
soon too! Now that's big and fast! We installed the drive in our test bed system which has on board Ultra Wide
SCSI. This took no time at all and was no more difficult to install than a typical CD ROM drive. Just slide it
in, hook up the cables and boot.
Here's what we found when putting the SC30 through its paces.
Quick File Transfers:
While most tape drives are really intended for
simple back up of your entire hard drive, the OnStream SC30 boast Transfer Rates that are adequate enough for simple transfer of files within Windows with
a drag and drop approach. We transferred a few small 1-2 MB Zip files and they were transferred very quickly. The
SC30 clicked through the transfer with ease. Upon puling the files off the drive we experienced a small pause of
almost a minute before our transfer was complete. Writing data to the drive by this method was very efficient.
Restore was a little more "clunky" but still vastly improve over its other tape cousins. We also played
small 2MB AVI Video clips with ease and there were no noticeable pauses or stuttering of any sort. This drive would
make excellent storage media for large video and multimedia production applications.
Back-Up:
We decided to go ahead and back up our IBM 9 Gig Drive to see
if we got anywhere in the ballpark of the "up to 7.2Gig/Hour" data rates. We ran two passes of the backup
on our Pentium III 450 rig with 128MB of RAM.
Our first pass was intended just to let the drive sit and do
its "thang" undisturbed. While backing up our data, the drive was extremely quiet only whirring slightly
as it streamed data on to the tape at approximately an average of 70MB/minute. Our drive was only about half full
of data and the back up took an hour and 15 minutes for 5.6Gigs. This a substantial improvement over traditional
tape drives that would have taken more than 3X the time it took the SC30.
Our second pass was to multi-task the system while the SC30
did its backup. We were very pleased to report that the SCSI version of this drive was very kind to the system
and Windows environment while it was doing its job. We were able to actually fire up a game of Quake 2 simultaneously
while backing up. The system, while noticeably slower, didn't lock once. The average transfer rate dropped to about
45MB/minute, which is still pretty snappy!
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