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There are just two different kinds of computer user in this world; those who have experienced hard disk failure, and those who are going to. How catastrophic a disk failure is depends on one thing - the state of your backups.
The OnStream Echo 30 is designed to help you avoid disaster by helping safeguard copies of your work. It is a high speed, high capacity tape backup drive, and while it isn’t exactly cheap, it sells for noticably less than traditional DAT drives of similar capacities. It is billed as a 30Gb device which, while true in one sense, is a little misleading. The ADR tape cartridges it uses will store 15Gb of uncompressed data, or 30Gb using 2:1 compression. This kind of claim is made by most DAT tape and drive manufacturers, and the full information is supplied in the small print, but it still feels less than totally honest. But quibbles aside, the tapes really do store up to 30Gb of data, something very useful now that hard drives of a dozen gigabytes or more are commonplace.
The Echo 30 drive comes with a standard 30Gb (15Gb uncompressed) ADR cartridge and a full copy of Retrospect Desktop, the industry standard personal and network backup software. This is enough to back up local drives and networked computers mounted on the host Mac’s desktop, although the higher-end Retrospect Remote should be added to the shopping list if you need to set up a proper network backup solution.
The Echo 30 is a SCSI device and sports two fast/narrow SCSI-2 connectors. It uses an external power adaptor with a proprietary connector. This didn’t show any signs of coming loose in our tests, although we initially felt the connection wasn’t quite as firm as we’d have liked for such a mission-critical device. A single light on the front shows when a cartridge is inserted, and blinks when it is active. There is a stylised air vent on the front, and a sticker warns against stacking any other devices on top. It this is a problem there is a separate clip-on stand which holds the Echo 30 on its side.
ADR cartridges are much larger than standard DAT tapes. The tape itself is metal backed, and as the read/write head in the drive is only in contact with the tape when it is actually transferring data it is said to be more reliable than DAT. (DAT drives spool tape around the head the whole time a cartridge is inserted.)
The speed of the drive is not claimed to match DAT or DLT mechanisms, but our real-world tests produced some interesting results. We tested the Echo 30 drive in a moderately well populated SCSI chain connected to the built in SCSI port in a beige G3. We used the supplied copy of Retrospect to back up specific folders from different drives, both internal and external. Our maximum sustained throughput for the Echo 30 drive was just over 70Mb a minute, with an average of around 68Mb a minute. This backs up OnStream’s claims that the Echo 30 delivers a througput of over 1Mb a second. When we performed exactly the same backup tasks to a DAT drive we achieved a maximum throughput of just over 30Mb a minute, less than half the speed of the Echo 30 drive. However with the right setup DAT drives should be able to more than make up the difference.
OnStream sell a cleaning tape for the Echo 30 and recommend that it is used occasionally to keep the drive functioning properly. However it says it is rarely necessary to clean the drive more than once every three months even when in frequent use, and, crucialy, it says that regular cleaning is not a requirement of the warranty.
ADR cartridges cost around £30 each, making the cost of backup, after the drive has been bought, just £1 per gigabyte. Whether the Echo 30 is the right backup solution for you depends on a number of factors, but if the contents of your hard drive matter to you, you really should fork out for a proper backup system before anything goes wrong. |
