Fresh Roasted DAT Drives, $0.01!

[Gregory Ade]

Well, in an amazing feat of engineering know-how, I managed to fry the
living daylights out of my Seagate DDS-3 DAT drive by cross-wiring 12vdc
and 5vdc on the power harness.

Yay me.

This creates a couple problems for me, and I was wondering if the rest
of you here might have some suggestions.  Note that things like "don't
ever re-wire Molex connectors when your tired" will be ignored, as I'm
already feeling stupid enough. :)

Problem 1:  This is the one that's more easily solved.  I have data on a
DDS-2 tape I need to recover.  I may just bring it in to work and
restore it to my notebook using one of the servers here.

Problem 2:  I actually do need to find some way to replace the
functionality.  I had been doing daily backups to DAT tape before last
night (what, don't you?), and I feel scared and naked now that I can't
do that anymore.  Not to mention I fear the wrath of my wife if
something else should happen and I lose her home directory.

Looking at PriceWatch, I find there are places selling DDS-3 Seagate
drives for as low as $208... That's by far the "simplest" solution, so
far.  Are there other solutions worth considering that wouldn't cost
much more?

One idea I've been toying with is getting one of those FireWire "mobile
rack" drive bays with two or three inserts, and getting a few 30-40GB
drives to cycle as backup media.  Recovery would be as simple as booting
from CD and dumping the "backup" drive to the system disk, or even just
putting the backup drive in as the system disk...  That's ~$60-$70 per
disk, plus whatever an internal firewire "mobile rack" kit with 1 or 2
spare carriers would cost, plus a firewire card...

Thoughts?

-- 
Gregory K. Ade <gregory at castandcrew.com>
Sr. Systems Administrator
Cast & Crew Entertainment Services, Inc.