Denys wrote about DDS-2 drives:
>
> Two years old.  Wow, you exceeded the service life by 20
> months.  Congratulations.  Now, it's time to look for a real
> backup device.
> Can you spell DLT, any DLT will be better than DDS-2.
>

Four months seems a tad short for mean time to failure. ;-)

Seriously though, it generally depends upon how often you use them. I had a
number of DDS-2 drives that lasted up to two years, but they were only used
once a day to store and verify.

That said, anything else, DDS-3, DDS-4, DLT, is better than the DDS-2. Denys
is right the DDS-2 are notorious for their failure rate. While DLT would be
your best choice, as Denys suggests, your system may not easily accommodate
DLT, in which case a DDS-3 or DDS-4 will give you better reliability than
the DDS-2 and will not cost as much as DLT. Remember you also need at least
one working DDS drive to read media from HP or your third party vendors.

John Burke

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *