If you are considering a VXA tape drive from exabyte (formerly ecrix)
you should be aware of a fatal flaw. Even though ads show a tape
soaking in a cup of coffee and a claim that the data is still
recoverable, the tape header is extremely fragile. If you are doing a
backup and the computer freezes and requires a hardboot as the header
is written, there is a great chance that the scsi controller version
will wipe out the header and all of the gigs of previous backups on
the tape might as well be gone. It costs thousands to retrieve the
data, and Exabyte will do nothing but give you a list of companies
that recover lost files. After it happened to me I did a google
search and found a post from someone else who suffered the same plight
from 2001 so they have known about the problem since then.