Freecom TapeWare USB DAT-72es review

Dave Mitchell Read more October 7, 2009

£364

Price when reviewed

At the small-business backup level, SCSI has never been a sensible tape drive interface choice, as it’s simply too expensive. The USB interface makes much more sense and this latest solution from Freecom teams up an HP DAT 72 tape drive with USB 2 connectivity.

The unit is built well enough with a lightweight plastic chassis and we recommend this over HP’s own external USB drive if you’re concerned about noise levels. The large cooling vents at the rear of the Freecom model mean it doesn’t need a fan, whereas HP’s smaller chassis employs a small but surprisingly irritating internal blower. Both HP and Freecom bundle Yosemite’s TapeWare XE backup software licensed for a single server. It isn’t our favourite due to a complex management interface, but it does offer a good range of features, including plenty of predefined backup strategies. The TapeWare disaster-recovery licence is also included, which ties in with HP’s OBDR (one button disaster recovery). Holding down the Eject button while powering it on causes the drive to emulate a bootable CD-ROM drive, so you can use the latest full backup copy to restore the system disk.

The DDS format hasn’t had the smoothest of roadmaps after being shelved in 2001 by the co-developers, Sony, Seagate and HP, and resurrected by the latter in 2003. HP’s development plans have been shrouded in mystery for a couple of years, but it advised us that DAT 160 will be released in April 2006 followed by two more generations, so it appears to have a fairly strong future.

We called in a Dell PowerEdge 830 loaded with Windows Server 2003 for performance testing and used a 15GB mish-mash of data typically found on the average small office or workgroup server. Installation starts by loading the USB drivers first and then connecting the tape drive, which takes only a few minutes. Starting with the bundled TapeWare, we created jobs to back up, verify and restore the data to its original location and saw it return approximately 169MB/min, 176MB/min and 171MB/min for each respective task.

For compatibility testing, we also used Symantec Backup Exec 10d and EMC Dantz Retrospect 7. Neither product had any problem identifying the drive, although if you insert a tape after Backup Exec starts its services it won’t see it and will require a service restart before the tape can be recognised. Overall, performance was much better than TapeWare, with Backup Exec returning 193MB/min for backup, 196MB/min for verification and 195MB/min for a full restoration. Retrospect was only one or two minutes slower than this. Returning to TapeWare, we also tested the OBDR feature by creating a full backup of the server. To run disaster recovery, the server needs to be powered down and the tape drive switched on with the tape already loaded and the Eject button held down. Once the Tape and Clean LEDs flash together, the server is switched on and will boot from the tape drive. It then presents a simple menu for recovering a boot disk or restoring the entire server from the backup tape.

It’s surprising it’s taken so long for USB tape drives to appear, but Freecom shows the wait was worthwhile. Performance is easily as good as the SCSI version and the bundled software offers useful disaster-recovery capabilities.