Posts Tagged ‘storage’

Robust Slr Backup Tape Storage Media

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Robust Slr Backup Tape Storage Media

The type and format of the backup storage medium used effects the future growth, investment protection and performance of the company. The restore & backup strategy are dependent on the format of the tape medium being used. According to the findings, more than five hundred thousand drives of SLR are installed in Servers of iSeries around the world. The SLR tape format is best suited for the “iSeries” and it protects the high volumes of data with fast recovery and backup performance. The SLR is the abbreviation of “Scalable Linear Recording” and Tandberg Data introduced the first generation SLR-1 tape in the year 1987.

Tandberg is one of the major manufacturer and supplier of the backup tape media products. The major tape formats of Tandberg are the Linear Tape Open (LTO), Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and the Scalable Linear Recording (SLR).

The product line of the Tandberg includes the backup tape libraries, tape autoloaders, media and backup data tape drives.

At first the SLR backup tape was based on the technology of QIC (Quarter Inch Cartridge). Afterwards the technology used was the SLR (Single Channel Linear Recording). Then new technology MLR (Multi Channel Linear Recording) was added and then to its present form of the SLR tape format. The SLR tape media products are highly scalable, reliable. They are also compatible both forward and backward with the other generations of SLR format.

In the SLR-7 tape the recording of the data is done on 2 tracks and is recording is done in parallel. While in SLR-60 & SLR-100, the recording is done on 4 tracks. The data is recorded on the media in such a form that incase of degrading of media, the data could be read in the operation of restoring. The attributes and technologies that enhance the speed of the SLR tape are the “auto sense function”, “inline compression”. The data buffers are also large in the SLR technology. The SLR-1 tape format gives the tape solution for entry level and at a low cost. Since the year of the introduction of SLR, about 2 million drives of SLR have been installed by the companies worldwide.

The cost of ownership for the SLR tape format is very low because it has low rate of failure which is about 1.5 percent. The SLR is best for those enterprises where the field maintenance is low.

The SLR-60 has 30 GB native capacity and 60GB of compressed recording capacity. The data transfer rate is 4MB/sec with 8MB/sec of compressed rate. The transfer rate per hour is 15GB/hour with compressed rate of 30GB/hour.

The SLR-100 has 50 GB native capacity and 100GB of compressed recording capacity. The data transfer rate is 5MB/sec with 10MB/sec of compressed rate. The transfer rate per hour is 18GB/hour with compressed rate of 36GB/hour.

The reliable and robust backup tape format choices for the small & medium business enterprises are the SLR-60, SLR-100 and the SLR-140 backup tapes.

The SLR technology has the capacity, technology and the features to fulfill the future’s data backup demands and requirements of the companies in efficient and cost effective manner. The roadmap of the SLR tape format has the ability to meet future demands for backup data storage. The roadmaps do tend to change with the passage of time and when the future generations come close to the existing and the present generations.

For more details and online order, please visit www.tape4backup.com

Storage Types for Digital Cameras

Storage Types for Digital Cameras

Unlike the 35mm film camera which differed only in the
number of shots and manufacturers, different digital
cameras use different storage media.

This is usually the case for different camera manufacturers
as some brands prefer to have a proprietary storage medium
for their cameras.

Aside from the different types of storage media, they also
differ in the amount of memory they can handle. Today’s
cameras eat up more memory which is why bigger memory is
the order of the day especially for professionals.

Here are some of the most popular storage media used by
digital cameras today:

1. Compact flash

- this is perhaps the most common storage device for
digital cameras, especially high-end ones like digital
SLRs.

Compact flash memory comes in two flavors: Type I and II.
Most cameras accept Type I although the Type II varieties
have a higher capacity.

2. Memory Stick

- this is a proprietary storage media produced and
developed by Sony not only for their digital cameras but
also on their other products.

Early Memory Sticks were able to store only up to 256MB
although Sony has already come up with the Memory Stick Pro
which has capacities up to 1GB.

3. Secure Digital (SD) and MultiMedia Cards

- are yet other varieties of storage media. Aside from
digital cameras, they can also be used on a host of devices
such as mobile phones.

These varieties are the smallest among storage media
especially when the micro SD memory was introduced to the
public. The SD card and the MMC (MultiMedia Card) are
basically the same except for the fact that SD cards have a
write-protect switch to protect the data that is stored
inside.

Storage

Once you’ve viewed your image through the viewfinder, composed and focused it with your lens, and captured the photons with the sensor, the final step is to store the digital image semipermanently so it can be transferred to your computer for viewing, editing, or printing. While the kind of storage you use in your camera won’t directly affect the quality of your image, it can impact the convenience and versatility of your dSLR, so storage is worth a short discussion.

Once converted to digital form, your images first make their way into a special kind of memory called a buffer, which accepts the signals from the sensor (freeing it to take another picture) and then passes the information along to your removable memory card. The buffer is important because it affects how quickly you can take the next picture. If your camera has a lot of this very fast memory, you’ll be able to take several shots in quick succession, and use a burst mode capable of several pictures per second for five or six or ten consecutive exposures.

Many digital SLRs provide a viewfinder readout showing either how many pictures can be stored in the remaining buffer or, perhaps, a flashing bar that “fills” as the buffer fills and gets smaller as more room becomes available for pictures. When your buffer is completely full, your camera stops taking pictures completely until it is able to offload some of the shots to your memory card.

The buffer is such a limitation on sequence photography that Nikon has introduced a dSLR that crops the center out of an image (creating an 6.8 megapixel picture out of a 12.4 megapixel photo) simply because the smaller images can be moved through the buffer more quickly. Nikon touts this feature as part of its faster burst mode.

The memory card itself has its own writing speed, which signifies how quickly it can accept images from the buffer. There’s no standard way of expressing this speed. Some card vendors use megabytes per second. Others label their cards as 40X, 80X, and so forth. Some prefer to use word descriptions, such as Standard, Ultra, Ultra II, or Extreme. I’m not going to tell you which cards are fastest here, because memory card technology and pricing is changing with blinding speed.

Google the Web for sites that have comparisons of speeds for various current memory cards before you buy. In recent months, the trend has been toward faster and faster memory cards at lower prices. That’s the main reason for the dropping price tags on those 1GB cards I bought. Both were older “standard” cards that were considered outmoded in a time when the leading vendors were pushing 2GB and larger “ultra” cards.

For standard shooting, I’ve never found the speed of my digital film to be much of a constraint, but if you shoot many action photos, sequences, or high-resolution (TIFF or RAW) pictures, you might want to compare write speeds carefully before you buy. A card that’s been tested to write more quickly can come in handy when you don’t have time to wait for your photos to be written from your camera’s buffer to the memory card. What I always recommend is to buy the fastest memory card you can afford in a size that will hold a decent number of pictures.

Then, purchase additional cards in larger sizes at bargain prices as your backups. For example, if you’ve got a lot of money to spend, you might want to buy a 2GB “ultra” card as your main memory card for everyday shooting, and stock up on slower, but dirt-cheap 1GB cards to use when your main card fills up. Or, if your budget is limited and you don’t need a high-speed card very often, spend your money on a 1GB or larger standard card, and treat yourself to high-speed media in a more affordable size, such as 512MB. That way, if you do need the extra-fast writing speed of an ultra card, you’ll have it without spending a bundle on a high-speed/high-capacity memory card. And you’ll have plenty of capacity in your standard digital film at an economical price.

You certainly won’t be choosing your digital camera based on the kind of storage it uses. Digital SLRs generally rely on CompactFlash for the most part, because CompactFlash media is small enough to be carried around easily and always seems to be on the leading edge of capacities.

Smaller form factors, such as the postage stamp-sized Secure Digital card, are not found in as many advanced cameras, and are annoyingly easy to misplace. However, SD cards are rapidly catching up to CompactFlash in capacities, and I’d expect many digital SLRs to have slots for both in the future, similar to the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II. Among non-SLR, point-and-shoot digital cameras, the various film card formats are proliferating at an alarming rate. Only the first three formats listed below are likely to see widespread use in digital SLRs, however.

■ CompactFlash. Among all digital cameras, CompactFlash is the second-most-favored format in the United States and first among digital SLRs. Although larger in size than Secure Digital (SD) cards, CompactFlash cards are still very small and convenient to carry and use. As larger capacities are introduced, they usually appear in CF format first. As a bonus, the CompactFlash slot can also be used for mini hard drives, such as those from IBM, with capacities of a gigabyte or more.

■ Secure Digital. The SD format overtook CompactFlash as the most popular memory card format in digital cameras with one of the last bastions, Nikon, finally adding an SD card camera to its compact point-and-shoot line. Most other vendors had long since converted for their compact digitals, although Canon continues to offer beginner cameras that use CompactFlash. The postage-stamp-sized SD cards allow designing smaller cameras, are available in roughly the same capacities as CompactFlash, and cost about the same. The chief drawback (to date) is that there are no mini hard drives in the SD format. If you want to use a mini hard disk, you’ll need a camera with a CompactFlash slot. Some digital cameras can also use the similar, but slower Multimedia Memory card (MMC). Figure 2.18 shows both CompactFlash and SD memory cards.

■ Mini hard drives. For a long time, mini hard drives were your only option when you needed more than a gigabyte of storage. If you’re using a 6 megapixel or better camera and like to save your images as TIFF files or in another lossless format, you need more than a gigabyte of storage. However, with CompactFlash cards now available in 4GB to 8GB sizes, the mini hard drive is losing its capacity edge, and they have always cost more than the equivalent silicon memory card. Although not excessively prone to failure, mini hard drives do have moving parts and must be handled with more care than memory cards.