HP SureStore DAT40e external DDS-4 Tape Drive

Product: DAT-40e

From: Hewlett-Packard Canada

The SureStore DAT40e tape drive is an external unit with a pair of SCSI-3 (LVD) connectors on the back. Our test unit came with a hefty 28-inch cable, terminating resistor, a pair of tapes and a cleaning cartridge, Colorado Backup II software for NT and Windows 9x, a suite of software utilities, plus documentation. We elected to use the LVD cables already installed in our test PC -- a Legend QDI dual-CPU BrillianX IV with an onboard Adaptec 7880 SCSI controller and Intel Ethernet. The tapes this drive is capable of writing can hold up to 40 Gigabytes of data, using the drive's hardware-assisted compression algorithms.

HP claims that the drive delivers "one button disaster recovery." It is both ironic and poignant that, during our attempt to connect and configure the drive, we somehow managed to completely trash Windows, necessitating a complete reinstall to a different directory -- along with the manual reconfiguration of all our applications and device drivers. If only this made-to-order disaster had occurred after we got the drive connected!

Several Hours Later....

After we finally completed a backup of our reconstructed drive, a message appeared: "Warning: A bootable backup was selected however a valid bootable image was not manually created. The current backup may not be useable with One-Button Disaster Recovery." The drive took about 2 hours to fully back up 16GB of data. (The box claims that the drive can transfer up to 21.6GB/hour.)

The job completion report also listed other issues with our backup, which used out-of-the-box default drive settings. "Warning: Software compression was requested on a hardware compressing device. Hardware compression will be used and software compression will be disabled. While it's great that the drive noticed this problem and automatically fixed it, we hadn't requested software compression. And we think the one-button software should prompt you to create the required "valid bootable image" if one if not present. Uncertainty and "May not be useable" messages are the last thing anyone needs when it comes to backups.

In fact, the Colorado Backup II software that comes with the DAT40e includes a separate Disaster Recovery Wizard that allows you to set up these and other options, including scheduled backups and the ability to boot from the tape drive in case of a disaster, eliminating the need for a set of floppy disks. If, however, your system's SCSI card isn't bootable or you prefer to use floppy disks, the Wizard will prompt you for the Windows CD and floppy diskettes necessary to complete Disaster Recovery preparations. The drive isn't compatible with Windows 98's built-in Backup program.

During one of our tests, we left Front Page 2000 open. The backup program noticed a total of four open files and reported for each one: "Error: busy or in use by another application, it will be skipped." It did, however, back up the Active registry, causing us to wonder why it can back up a currently active operating system, registry and its own backup software code, but can't handle other active application files. When we closed FrontPage and clicked the "one button backup" icon on the desktop again, the software performed an incremental backup. It took 8 minutes and 7 seconds to refresh its backup to reflect this tiny change (changing more than 50 MB of data in the progress!), but oddly still reported file open messages ("Error: C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\index.dat - busy or in use by another application, it will be skipped."), even though all applications other than the backup program were closed. It also advised us that we had selected software compression again and still lacked a valid bootable image -- another "may not be useable" backup.

The drive kept APM (advanced power management) from kicking in on our test machine -- definitely a good thing. A message appeared "Your computer cannot go on standby because a device driver or program won't allow it. Close all open programs, and then try again."

Our worst experience with the tape drive happened during a subsequent test. We started with a freshly re-formatted tape (used only once before) and backed up up a total of about 25 gigabytes of data. As before, the software verified that our system would be capable of "One-button Disaster Recovery" and proceeded to make the backup -- again, warning us of a few open files (mostly related to Internet Explorer) that could not be backed up. Seemingly, the procedure completed normally and we dutifully put the tape away. But the shocker occurred later, when we tried to restore our system. The unit could not read the tape, complaining that "An error occurred while retrieving the backup directory. An unformatted region was detected on the media." It didn't even try to work around the problem, nor were we able to recover any files. This in itself earned the unit a failing grade -- and, frankly, strikes us as the fatal weakness in tape-based systems in general.

The HP SureStore DAT40 DDS-4 tape drive is available now through HP authorized resellers, distributors and retailers.

For Further Reading:

• Disaster Recovery
• DVD-RAM- Giga Storage!
• Drive price, cost per megabyte and reliability all factor in consumers' minds when choosing a removable storage system
• Mass Storage Solutions