PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Our Picks

Although prices vary widely, buying any tape drive and tapes is a significant expense. Many people consider that expense unjustified, and so do not install a tape drive. If you find yourself thinking that way, we suggest you reconsider. Too often, we hear from readers who have lost their data. The cost of salvaging or recreating that data may exceed the cost of a tape drive by orders of magnitude, assuming that it is possible to recover the data at all. Catastrophic data loss is a very common cause of small business failures.

If you store your data on a network server that is properly backed up, you probably don’t need a tape drive on your desktop PC. If you have a relatively small amount of data and are willing to rebuild your PC from scratch if the hard drive fails, you may be safe in backing up to a remote server or using a CD/DVD writer, removable hard drive, or a similar product. But if you have a lot of valuable data on your system that is not otherwise backed up, you need a tape drive. Following are the tape drives we recommend.

Travan TR-5 Tape Drive

Seagate STT220000-series Travan TR-5. For backing up small servers and high-end PCs, Seagate STT220000-series tape drives are a superb choice when drive cost is more important than tape cost. We consider the Seagate Travan tape drives to be the most reliable inexpensive drives available.

Seagate produces multiple variants of this drive, including ATAPI and SCSI-2 versions, both of which are available as Hornet models ...