[comp.sys.att] 9 track storage capacity

rwo0@isg300.UUCP (Roger W. Otterson) (02/02/89)

I have recently been assigned the duty of backing up our system.
We have a 3b2/522 w/ (6) 322mb SCSI drives.  Needless to say it
takes some time to do complete system backups.

My backup device is a SCSI 9track tape drive.

My questions are:

How much can each tape hold (2400 or 3600 feet), and how do I
guesstimate how much tape I will need to backup a file system.
And what are the "magic" formulas to figure all of this out ??

Roger Otterson
Information Systems Group

latzko@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Alex Latzko) (02/04/89)

In article <97@isg300.UUCP> rwo0@isg300.UUCP (Roger W. Otterson) writes:

> I have recently been assigned the duty of backing up our system.
> We have a 3b2/522 w/ (6) 322mb SCSI drives.  Needless to say it
> takes some time to do complete system backups.
> 
> My backup device is a SCSI 9track tape drive.
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> How much can each tape hold (2400 or 3600 feet), and how do I
The normal rule of thumb is a 2400' 1600bpi tape will hold 40Mbytes
when blocked at 32Kbytes/block.  140Meg is the figure at 6250.

You can figure it out if you know the lenght of a block in bytes
and the number of blocks written in a group.  The distance between 
blocks on the tape is called the inter record gap and if memory
serves is 1/4 inches.

> Roger Otterson
> Information Systems Group
cheers
/S*
latzko@rutgers.edu
{backbone}!rutgers!latzko