Exabyte's New Tape Drive Acts Fast

It's an inescapable law of computing that "data loss happens." Accidents, viruses, hardware failures, and other calamities make backing up hard drives a necessity. A new tape drive product from Exabyte not only offers high capacity but also addresses concerns about speed and efficiency.

Exabyte's VXA-2 offers plenty of speed with a 6-megabytes-per-second native transfer rate (the equivalent of 4.3X DVD) and a capacity of up to 160GB per tape.

That figure, however, assumes an unlikely two-to-one compression ratio, as does Exabyte's advertised 12MBps transfer rate. You might actually get 160GB or more of data on a cartridge--but only if your hard drive is heavily loaded with business documents and worksheets (which are highly compressible).

If your mix is predominantly MP3s, digital photos, or video files--all of which are already compressed--you may get little to no added compression with Exabyte's technology. Even in that case, however, you can fit 80GB per tape cartridge, almost 10 times what you could get on dual- or double-density DVD (write-once) media and around 20 times what fits on most rewritable DVD discs. And that's Exabyte's answer to the main complaint about <link type="internal" src="/reviews/article/0,aid,101767,00.asp>backing up</link> an overflowing system to rewritable DVD media, namely, having to swap all those discs (and making two copies, including one to store off-site for complete business safety).

Prices, Options

The VXA-2 is an update to Exabyte's revolutionary VXA-1, introduced back in 1999 with built-in hardware compression and aimed at small businesses. It has many of the same advantages.

Of course, the VXA-2 is not for everybody. You can get an external DVD+RW drive for less than $200 or an internal one for $125; 4.7GB rewritable DVD media costs about $2 a disc. But an external FireWire VXA-2 tape drive costs about $1000 on the street (a cheaper internal IDE bare-drive version is also available at major resellers for about $850).

The V23 cartridges that are rated at 80/160GB will set you back $79 each. Lesser-capacity, less-expensive cartridges are also available. The V6 20/40GB retails for $27; the V10 40/80GB, for $40; and the V17 60/120GB, for $67.

Exabyte claims up to 500 usages before failure, though you might be wise to swap out a lot sooner. The FireWire version comes bundled with Retrospect Express. You'll need to buy your own backup software to use with the internal drive. Excellent compatible backup packages include StompSoft's Backup My PC 5 Deluxe and Retrospect Professional 6.5 from Dantz, and can be found for less than $100.

But the admittedly hefty chunk of change you'll have to shell out buys you a lot of convenience and security. For starters, because of VXA-2's high capacity, you can back up unattended. Do you really want to hang around at the end of the day and swap discs? Of course not.

Then there's portability: a tape that's not much wider and deeper than a credit card and less than a half-inch thick is a lot easier to take off-site than a hard drive--and a lot less likely to be damaged by rough handling. Additional tapes are also considerably less expensive than additional hard drives.

There's no arguing that tape has a spotty reputation for reliability--anyone who's experience a jammed music cassette will mistrust the medium. However, VXA-2 has features that should eliminate nearly all the problems suffered by older tape technology. A VXA drive can vary the speed of the tape down to a full stop so there's none of the back-hitching (reversing) that can stretch tapes when the data flow shrinks. And the way the VXA drives write data in packets and then read it with an advanced over-scanning method virtually eliminates woes caused by misaligned tape heads. Even the tapes that VXA drives use are significantly more robust than those found in older products.

Trying It Out

We took both IDE and FireWire versions of the VXA-2 for hands-on test spins. We got the best results from the IDE version after delving into the Windows Device manager to set the IDE driver to DMA mode (Windows XP set the drive to PIO mode by default).

We backed up 52.6GB to a single V17 tape in about 2 hours and 46 minutes. That's roughly 5.1MBps or about 3.7X in DVD terms. The verify cycle was just a hair faster at 5.4MBps or 3.9X. The FireWire version hovered around 4.1MBps; however, Exabyte claims a new FireWire bridge chip that will be implemented soon should pull its FireWire version even with the IDE version.

As to unattended backups, no problem. With the VXA-2 we were able to back up our entire desktop overnight to one tape. Dantz's Retrospect backup software even shut down the PC for us. And a tape ejected at the end of a backup isn't as likely to be damaged by power surges as an attached hard drive.

What's Next

Exabyte has already announced plans for VXA-3, which should double the maximum transfer rate and capacity of the current VXA-2. VXA-3 is specced at 12MBps with uncompressed data and up to 24MBps with compressed data. It will also store from 160GB (native) to up to 320GB of compressed data per tape. Exabyte expects to market VXA-3 products in mid 2005.

Bottom line: Backup can be that pesky chore you forgot to do one time too many. Or it can be the task you automated with a powerful and reliable tape drive so that you made sure it would happen. The choice is up to you.