Backup drives have come a long way in the past few years. They transfer data faster than ever and access files quickly. The incredible growth in the amount of data that must be backed up, and the requirements of the storage-management applications that were developed to manage that growth, created the demand for such speedy drives. Storage management is being applied to all types of applications, from volume managers to backup systems. This article concentrates on the two types of storage-management applications closely associated with backups: archiving and hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems. Both types of applications assist the administrator in moving older data off disks and onto less expensive media, such as tape or CD-ROM. Both types also significantly increase the number of mount requests that a tape or optical library receives. If you are considering a storage-management system, you must have a backup drive with a very short time-to-data rate or random-access time. (July 1999)