Ecrix VXA tape drives - track record?

[jabr at blu.org (John Abreau)]

I'm trying to budget for a tape drive, and it appears that the Ecrix
VXA may be my first choice. I seem to recall a question about them on
one of these lists a long time ago, where there were very few replies,
all positive, and the consensus at the time was that the VXA was too
new to have a track record.

Now that some time has passed, how many folks here have tried the VXAs?
What do you think of them?

For reference, I'd be using the drive in a single server, brand-new, that
I'm building and will be deploying at a colocation site. I have no prior
legacy tapes to deal with, and no other machines involved. A tape library
is way beyond what we can afford, so that's not a consideration either.

We'll most likely be reusing the same tape repeatedly for a time, and
swapping it out as an archive tape peroidically, either weekly or monthly.
So the ability to rewrite each tape many times is important.

This is not an ideal backup strategy, I know, but it's probably the best
we can do at this point, and I figure it's better than having no backups
at all.

Thanks.

--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
ICQ 28611923 / AIM abreauj / JABBER jabr at jabber.org / YAHOO abreauj
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.blu.org
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