Guy writes:
 
>Aside from the HP devices, and the StorTek cartidge drives, I'm not
>aware of faster alternatives.  Any leads are appreciated.
 
IMHO, outside of using disk drives as the target of your backups, there
is nothing faster than the StorageTek drive (at least about 6 months ago
when we were doing this testing). We had one of the multi-drive gizmos in
shop for a while when we were testing <plug> Online Backup+ <\plug> with
them. They were blazingly fast. They could also quite quickly consume a
SCSI bus and thus should be on their own channel for optimum performance.
 
Some of the newer compressing DDS drives might reach similar performance,
but I've not yet touched these drives, so have no first hand knowledge.
 
But, let's consider my first statement above. With the cost of larger
disk drives getting less and less (and in most instances, far less than
corresponding tape devices), perhaps considering disk to disk backups is
a viable alternative to tape based backups. <plug>If you follow the
strategy that something like Backup+ uses, you can then at your leisure,
dump the disk to disk file to tape if so required and have the best of
both worlds. <\plug>