i am looking for any information or advice as to the most linux friendly DLT drives on the market. i am currently running gentoo, but any help in general would be greatly appreciated. cheers!

We have a HP Surestore DLT in our company. it is working great. The oldone with 80 GB max and the new one with up to 320 GB too.

thanks for the response vbisis, the information is helpful. have you had any installation issues with either drive? is it a known fact in the linux community that the HP drives are particularly good? if not, have you heard anything about another make/model that is in consensus with a lot of people?
thanks again!

We didn't have any installations issues with the drives. We use them under RedHat ES 2.1, 3 and 4 so it is supported for quite a time know. It is attached to a adaptec onboard scsi controller, which alsa wokrs flawless. Since we use ICP Vortex controllers as well, I can tell you that those are supported as well.
But I really don't know anything about other Tape drives, since we only use HP or previously Quantum, which are the same.

Maybe you can have a look at the HCL? But as far as I know HP works well with open source developers and wants their products supported in linux ( They also have a really good printer support )

Anyway, we use arkeia backup and they have a compatibility list on their website, maybe it helps:

http://www.arkeia.com/resources/refs...lity/tape/&t=a