>SATA/300 is 3 Gb/s, not 3 GB/s. There is also a 8/10 encoding to take into 
>account, which puts the actual maximum transfer speed to 300 MB/s. No 
>actual drive can deliver a sustained write speed that high though; a 
>really fast drive might approach 100 MB/s. At that speed it would take 
>roughly three hours to fill the disk, assuming that the source disks can 
>deliver data at the same speed and the CPU can keep up.

Ah, I misread something, still that's at least 150 MB/s, faster
than the HD will go.

They do make faster tape drives with more storage, but it
sounds like Andy's company might as well re-use the old
hardware. I bet it's one of those machines you could dig
out of a building collapse and still recover the data. And
if they compress the data they probably can fit a 160 GB
backup onto a single tape.

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