Tandberg Data 160GB 3.5" SATA 8459 User Manual

backups to be accomplished in the traditional fashion of moving data directly to a device with 

removable media. To the computer, the RDX cartridge looks just like a tape cartridge. However, 

backup performance and reliability are distinctly different.  

It takes the RDX drive less than an hour to back up 80 GB of native data at its 30 MB per second 

transfer rate. For this same operation in the tape world, a DLT V4 drive takes over two hours, a 

DAT160 drive takes almost four hours, and a DAT72 drive requires over seven hours.  

And on a restore, the RDX media has all of the read/write advantages of a hard disk drive. What 

also takes hours of serialized search in the tape world, takes milliseconds with the RDX drive. In 

brief, a RDX backup lets you vastly improve customer response times by allowing you to recover 

customer files in minutes instead of hours. 

The most successful tape replacement offerings to date have been the disk-to-disk (D2D) systems. 

Nonetheless, these systems do not really replace tape so much as they change the backup 

architecture. Instead of backing up data directly to tape, D2D systems are added as an interim step 

to increase performance. The backup application writes data to the D2D target, and then, at some 

later time, moves the data to tape for off-site disaster recovery and long-term storage.  This 

architecture is commonly known as disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T). While D2D2T has performance 

and availability advantages over a tape-only design, it doesn’t really replace tape. And these 

advantages come at the expense of increased cost, more management, and system complexity. 

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