Personally, I don't see formating as a problem.  We are currently backing up
to dual DLT7000s nightly, and since we haven't been doing it that long, we
still haven't gone once through our pool of DLT tapes.  Our backups are
still under 2 1/2 hours (while our DDS-3 backups were about 3 1/2).

-------------------------------
Gary L. Paveza, Jr.
Technical Support Specialist
All opinions are mine and not those of my employer

        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Nick Demos [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
        Sent:   Tuesday, April 13, 1999 3:26 PM
        To:     [log in to unmask]
        Subject:        Re: DLT7000 vs DLT4000?

        Howard Hoxsie wrote:
        >
        > Is there a chance that the F/W SCSI channel is the bottleneck?  I
seem to
        > remember that they are 20mb/sec and that the DLT7000 can go faster
than that
        > if it is on a High Speed SCSI channel.  Hope I'm not barking down
the wrong
        > cable here.....
        >
        > Can anyone confirm or deny?  I'm interested in checking out
DLT7000's
        > myself, primarily for the high-volume backup capability of 70Gig
compressed.
        >
        Just a thought, here.

        You said you used virgin tapes.  As I recall, the drive has to
        format the
        tapes if they are not already formatted and this takes time.

        Could this be a factor?

        Nick D.