Onstream SC50-01 50GB Internal SCSI Digital Tape Drive

Other products by OnStream

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000300CA
• Item model number: SC50-01
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 3, 1999

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The OnStream SC50 internal SCSI is ideal for medium to large PC servers (using leading server backup software) or power workstations (using OnStream Echo software). The OnStream SC50 Digital Drive for PC servers and mission-critical workstations delivers native transfer rates of up to 2 MBps. At 50 GB capacity, the SC50 can back up the hard disks of most PC servers on a single cartridge. The SC50 does this at less than half the cost of competing products with similar capacities.

From Winmag®

At the high end of the storage spectrum is OnStream's new tape-drive model. Acting as a tape drive or hard drive substitute (or both at the same time), the OnStream SC50 is the 50GB (compressed) cousin to the 30GB version we reviewed in our Better Backups special report in April. The OnStream SC50's appearance and performance are equivalent: Backup ran at 82.78MB per minute, while copying files in Windows Explorer ran at 42.67MB per minute. The drive stores 25GB under a drive letter as though it's a hard drive, but since it's really a tape drive, shuttling could cause performance problems. Copying 500MB from our hard drive to the OnStream SC50 took about 12 minutes. But copying 40MB from the OnStream SC50 to another folder on the same tape took an hour.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Onstream SC50 External Tape Drive, December 29, 2003

By	ripcordrogers@comcas (Olathe, Kansas) - See all my reviews

I'll keep this short. The tape drive is very affordable for what it does. As in other reviews the restore process with this tape drive is very slow. The performance is lacking, but for a home user who does have plenty of patience, this could work! I'm currently using this tape drive with Veritas Backup Exec. At this point the installation was difficult, but after a couple of hours on the internet surfing I located a website that had drivers for Windows XP and W2K. Of course, all the websites listed for Onstream were not working. So I'm wondering about the long term support of this equipment. This is definitely not meant for highend usage. You will regret it! Definitely for home use. I was a firm DLT Tape Drive user, and after my experience with this drive, I'm still a firm DLT Tape Drive user. But in all fairness, if your budget won't allow a decent backup solution, this will work for you for the cost!